








3 b 
















THE 

AMERICAN LANGUAGE 

An Inquiry into the Development 
of English in the United States 


by 

H. L. MENCKEN 


THIRD EDITION 
REVISED AND ENLARGED 



NEW YORK 

ALFRED A: KNOPF 

MCMXXIII 




COPYRIGHT, 1919 , BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. 
COPYRIGHT, 1921 , BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. 
COPYRIGHT, 1923 , BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. 


Revised Edition Published December, 1921 
Third Edition (Again Revised), February, 1923 


Set and electrotyped by J. J. Little & Ives Co., New York. 

Printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y., on Warren’s No. 66 paper 
Bound by the H. Wolff Estate, New York. 


MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


CONTENTS 


Preface to Third Edition vii-ix 

I. Introductory 1 

1. The Diverging Streams of English 1 

2. The Academic Attitude 5 

3. The View of Writing Men 13 

4. Foreign Observers 26 

5. The General Character of American English 29 

6. The Materials of the Inquiry 40 

II. The Beginnings of American 47 

1. The First Differentiation 47 

2. Sources of Early Americanisms 53 

3. New Words of English Material 57 

4. Changed Meanings 64 

5. Archaic English Words 67 

6. Colonial Pronunciation 72 


III. The Period of Growth 


77 


1. Character of the New Nation 77 

2. The Language in the Making 89 

3. The Expanding Vocabulary 94 

4. Loan Words and Non-English Influences 103 

5. Pronunciation before the Civil War 113 


IV. American and English Today 


116 


1. The Two Vocabularies 116 

2. Differences in Usage 120 

3. Honorifics 138 

4. Euphemisms 145 

5. Expletives and Forbidden Words 150 


V. International Exchanges 159 

1. Americanisms in England 159 

2. Briticisms in the United States 17Q 

iii 


IV 


CONTENTS 


VI. Tendencies in American 179 

1. General Characters 179 

2. Lost Distinctions 184 

3. Processes of Word-Formation 189 

4. Foreign Influences Today 204 

VII. The Standard American Pronunciation 213 

1 . General Characters 213 

2 . The Vowels 221 

VIII. American Spelling 228 

1 . The Two Orthographies 228 

2 . The Influence of Webster 235 

3. The Advance of American Spelling 243 

4. British Spelling in the United States 246 

5. Simplified Spelling 250 

6 . The Treatment of Loan-Words 255 

7. Minor Differences 260 

IX. The Common Speech 262 

1. Grammarians and Their Ways 262 

2. Spoken American as It Is 269 

3. The Verb 278 

4. The Pronoun 298 

5. The Adverb 312 

6 . The Noun 315 

7. The Adjective 316 

8 . The Double Negative 318 

9. Other Syntactical Peculiarities 320 

10 . Vulgar Pronunciation 321 

X. Proper Names in America 329 

1 . Surnames 329 

2. Given Names 347 

3. Geographical Names 352 

4. Street Names 333 

XI. American Slang 339 

1 . Its Origin and Nature 339 

2. War Slang 37 g 


CONTENTS 


v 


XII. The Future of the Language 382 

1 . English as a World Language 382 

2 . English or American? 392 

APPENDICES 

I. Specimens of the American Vulgate 398 

1 . The Declaration of Independence in American 39S 

2 . Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address \ 402 

3. Baseball-American 404 

4. Vers Americain 405 

II. Non-English Dialects in America 407 

1 . German 407 

2 . French 410 

3. Spanish 413 

4. Yiddish 416 

5. Italian 419 

6 . Dano-Norwegian 422 

7. Swedish 424 

8 . Dutch 426 

9. Icelandic 430 

10. Greek 431 

11 . The Slavic Languages 432 

III. Proverb and Platitude 433 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1 . General 436 

2. Dictionaries of Americanisms 441 

3 . The Process of Language Growth 442 

4. Loan-Words 444 

5. Pronunciation 445 

6 . Regional Variation 447 

a. General Discussions 447 

b. New England 447 

c. The Middle States 448 

d. The South 449 

e. The Middle West 450 

/. The Far West 451 

g. The Colonies 451 

h. Negro-English 451 


vi 


CONTENTS 


7. Spelling 451 

8 . Geographical Names 453 

9 . Surnames and Given Names 456 

10. Non-English Languages in America 457 

a. German 457 

b. French 458 

c. Dano-Norwegian 460 

d. Dutch 460 

e. Swedish 460 

/. Spanish 460 

g. Icelandic 461 

h. Italian 461 

i. Yiddish 462 

j. Portuguese 462 

Tc. General 462 

11 . Other Colonial Dialects of English 462 

a. Australian 462 

b. Beach-la-Mar 462 

c. South African 463 

d. Canadian 463 

e. East Indian 463 

/. Pidgin-English 463 

12. Slang 463 

13. Euphemisms, Nicknames, and Forbidden Words 465 

14. Rudimentary Speech 466 

15. The Future of the Language 466 

16. Bibliographies of American English 467 

List of Words and Phrases 469 

485 


General Index 


PEE FACE TO THE THIRD EDITION 


This edition, like the second, has been extensively revised. I 
have added new material to nearly every chapter, and all of them 
have been diligently scrutinized for errors. In detecting those errors 
I have been greatly aided by the fact that the second edition was 
published in both the United States and England. One of the 
consequences thereof was that it was reviewed at length in the Eng¬ 
lish press, and that my necessarily imperfect acquaintance with cur¬ 
rent English usages was improved by the observations of men on 
the spot. The result is visible in the chapter on ‘‘American and 
English Today,” which, I hope, is measurably sounder than it was 
in the second edition. But even here there are still regions in 
which doubt prevails. So many Americanisms have gone over into 
standard English of late that Englishmen tend to lose the sense of 
their foreignness. For example, consider the word homely, in its 
American sense of unbeautiful. The latest English guide-book for 
visiting Americans (Muirhead’s “London and Its Environs,” 1922, 
p. 10) gives specific warning that homely means “domestic, unpre¬ 
tending, home-like” in England, and that it is “seldom if ever” 
used as a synonym for 'plain-looking. Moreover, Dean W. R. Inge, 
in an article in the London Evening Standard (November 24, 1921), 
has cited it as one of five important words whose meanings differ 
in the two countries. Nevertheless, a number of English reviewers 
objected to my attempt to distinguish between the American homely 
and the English homely, and insisted that the former was in uni¬ 
versal use in England. In the face of such conflicts of evidence it 
is difficult to get at the truth. In many cases I have evaded the 
matter by omitting the word in dispute. But in other cases, despite 
indications of its transplantation to England, I have continued to 
regard it as an Americanism, though always noting that transplan¬ 
tation. 


vu 


PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION 


• • • 
mi 

Since my second edition was published there have been various 
evidences of a growing interest in the development of the English 
language in the United States. For one thing, the Society for Pure 
English, organized in England in 1913 with the Poet Laureate at 
its head, has extended its activities to this country, and now has 
an American secretary, Dr. Henry Seidel Canby. The ostensible 
aim of the society is to improve standard English by importing 
words and idioms into it from the English dialects, including the 
Am erican, and by restoring to it that bold and enterprising habit 
which marked it in Elizabethan days, but is now chiefly confined, 
as I try to show in the pages which follow, to what the London 
Times has called Amerenglish. This aim, I believe, is honestly 
cherished by the Poet Laureate, Dr. Bridges, as his writings on the 
subject sufficiently demonstrate, but I am inclined to think that 
many of his American collaborators are rather intent upon an enter¬ 
prise no more novel or intelligent than that of augmenting the 
authority of standard English in America. That is to say, they are 
simply Anglomaniacs. This is certainly true, for example, of Mr. 
Logan Pearsall Smith, the expatriated American who is honorary 
secretary of the society, and of Dr. Brander Matthews, the prin¬ 
cipal American contributor to its tracts. The curious case of Dr. 
Matthews is dealt with at various places in the chapters following. 
Like his employer, Adolph S. Ochs, of the New York Times, Dr. 
Matthews is so ardent an advocate of Anglo-American unity, with 
England as the lordy husband and the United States as the dutiful 
and obedient wife, that he sees every effort to study the growing 
divergences, cultural, political and linguistic, between the two na¬ 
tions as no more than evidence of a sinister conspiracy of Bol- 
sheviki, Germans, Irishmen and Jews. The English, of course, 
are not taken in by such nonsense. The Saturday Review, which is 
certainly not deficient in English spirit, lately declared that Dr. 
Matthews “minimizes the national differences in language to an 
absurd degree,” and set down his curious notion that American 
novelists do not use Americanisms as “obviously a war hope, like 
hanging the Kaiser.” But he is supported by various other Gelehr- 
ten of the Sunday supplement species, and, to some degree, by the 
National Council of Teachers of English. This organization of 


PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION 


IX 


pedagogues, following the drive managers of the war time, conducts 
an annual Better Speech Week. The documents it issues offer but 
one more proof of the depressing fact that schoolmasters, at least in 
America, learn nothing and forget nothing. Its whole campaign 
seems to he centered upon an effort to protect the grammar books 
against the living speech of the American people. 

As this edition goes to press, Dr. George Philip Krapp’s large 
work, “The History of the English Language in America,” has not 
yet been issued. Dr. Krapp, however, has politely permitted me to 
read his manuscript. His book presents an immense mass of 
material, and in the department of phonology most of that material 
is new. The complaint that I made in my first edition, that no 
adequate study of the development of American pronunciation ex¬ 
isted, may be maintained no longer. But my discussions of the 
subject in the chapters which follow would be modified only in 
detail by the publication of Dr. Krapp’s work, and so I have let 
them stand. It was my hope that some other American scholar 
would undertake a study of the grammar of vulgar American, hut 
so far this has not been done. Nor is there, as yet, any adequate 
investigation of American surnames, or of American slang. Per¬ 
haps Dr. Krapp’s example will start work in these directions. Cer¬ 
tainly it is absurd for American philologists to disdain, as they have 
in the past, the study of the national language. Judging by the 
communications that I have received from many of them—some, alas, 
rather waspish!—I incline to believe that the successive editions of 
the present work have broken down some of their old aloofness. 
Maybe the inquiries that I have suggested are being made even 
now. 

The present edition is electrotyped, and I do not propose to make 
any changes in it for several years. The time and labor that I 
have put into it have kept me from other tasks that now press for 
execution. But soon or late, as fresh material accumulates, I’ll 
probably go back to it. Meanwhile, I shall be grateful for any cor¬ 
rections or additions that are sent to me at my home, 1524 Hollins 
street, Baltimore. H. L. M. 

1923. 








I. 


INTRODUCTORY 

1 . 

The Diverging Streams of English 

Thomas Jefferson, with his usual prevision, saw clearly more than 
a century ago that the American people, as they increased in num¬ 
bers and in the diversity of their national interests and racial strains, 
would make changes in their mother tongue, as they had already 
made changes in the political institutions of their inheritance. 
“The new circumstances under which we are placed,” he wrote to 
John Waldo from Monticello on August 16, 1813, “call for new 
words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new ob¬ 
jects. An American dialect will therefore be formed.” 

Nearly a quarter of a century before this, another great Ameri¬ 
can, and one with an expertness in the matter that the too versatile 
Jefferson could not muster, had ventured upon a prophecy even 
more bold and specific. He was Noah Webster, then at the begin¬ 
ning of his stormy career as a lexicographer. In his little volume of 
“Dissertations on the English Language,” printed in 1789 and dedi¬ 
cated to “His Excellency, Benjamin Franklin, Esq., LL.D., F.R.S., 
late President of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” Webster 
argued that the time for regarding English usage and submitting to 
English authority had already passed, and that “a future separation 
of the American tongue from the English” was “necessary and un¬ 
avoidable.” “Numerous local causes,” he continued, “such as a 
new country, new associations of people, new combinations of ideas 
in arts and sciences, and some intercourse with tribes wholly un¬ 
known in Europe, will introduce new words into the American 
tongue. These causes will produce, in a course of time, a language 

1 


2 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


in North America as different from the future language of England 
as the modem Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the German, 
or from one another.” 1 

Neither Jefferson nor Webster put a term upon his prophecy. 
They may have been thinking, one or both, of a remote era, not yet 
come to dawn, or they may have been thinking, with the facile 
imagination of those days, of a period even earlier than our own. 
In the latter case they allowed far too little (and particularly 
Webster) for factors that have worked powerfully against the influ¬ 
ences they saw so clearly in operation about them. One of these 
factors, obviously, has been the vast improvement in communica¬ 
tions across the ocean, a change scarcely in vision a century ago. 
It has brought New York relatively nearer to London today than 
it was to Boston, or even to Philadelphia, during Jefferson’s presi¬ 
dency, and that greater proximity has produced a steady inter¬ 
change of ideas, opinions, news and mere gossip. We latter-day 
Americans know a great deal more about the everyday affairs of 
England than the early Americans did, for we read more English 
books, and find more about the English in our newspapers, and 
meet more Englishmen, and go to England much oftener. The 
effects of this ceaseless traffic in ideas and impressions, so plainly 
visible in politics, in ethics and aesthetics, and even in the minutiae 
of social intercourse, are also to be seen in the language. On the 
one hand there is a swift exchange of new inventions on both sides, 
so that many of our American neologisms quickly pass to London 
and the latest English fashions in pronunciation are almost in¬ 
stantaneously imitated, at least by a minority, in New York; and, 
on the other hand, the English, by so constantly having the floor, 
force upon us, out of their firmer resolution and certitude, and no 

1 Pp. 22-23. A year before this, in his Plan of a Federal University, con¬ 
tributed to the American Museum for 1788, Dr. Benjamin Rush had indulged 
himself in a rather more measured prognostication. Under the heading of 
Philology he said: “Instruction in this branch of literature will become the 
more necessary in America as our intercourse must soon cease with the bar, 
the stage and the pulpit of Great Britain, from whence (stio) we received our 
knowledge of the pronunciation of the English language. Even modern English 
books should cease to be the models of style in the United States. The present 
is the age of simplicity of writing in America. The turgid style of Johnson, 
the purple glare of Gibbon, and even the studied and thick-set metaphors of 
Junius are all equally unnatural and should not be admitted into our country.” 


INTRODUCTORY 


3 


less out of the authority that goes with their mere cultural seniority, 
a somewhat sneaking respect for their own greater conservatism of 
speech, so that our professors of the language, in the overwhelming 
main, combat all signs of differentiation with the utmost diligence, 
and safeguard the doctrine that the standards of English are the 
only reputable standards of American. 

This doctrine, of course, is not supported by the known laws of 
language, nor has it prevented the large divergences that we shall 
presently examine, hut all the same it has worked steadily toward 
a highly artificial formalism, and as steadily against the investiga¬ 
tion of the actual national speech. Such grammar, so-called, as is 
taught in our schools and colleges, is a grammar standing four¬ 
legged upon the theorizings and false inferences of English Latinists 
of a past generation, 2 eager only to break the wild tongue of Shake¬ 
speare to a rule; and its frank aim is to create in us a high respect 
for a hook language which few of us ever actually speak and not 
many of us even learn to write. That language, elaborately arti¬ 
ficial though it may he, undoubtedly has merits. It shows a sonority 
and a stateliness that you must go to the Latin of the Golden Age 
to match; its “highly charged and heavy-shotted” periods, in Matthew 
Arnold’s phrase, serve admirably the obscurantist purposes of Amer¬ 
ican pedagogy and of English parliamentary oratory and leader¬ 
writing; it is something for the literary artists of both countries 
to prove their skill upon by flouting it. But to the average Ameri¬ 
can, bent upon expressing his ideas, not stupendously but merely 
clearly, it must always remain something vague and remote, like 
Greek history or the properties of the parabola, for he never speaks 
it or hears it spoken, and seldom encounters it in his everyday read¬ 
ing. If he learns to write it, which is not often, it is with a rather 
depressing sense of its artificiality. He may master it as a Korean, 


2 Most latter-day English grammarians, of course, (e.g., Sweet and Jespersen) 
ground their work upon the spoken language. But inasmuch as this differs from 
American English, the American pedagogues remain faithful to the gram¬ 
marians of the era before phonology became a science, and imitate them in 
most of their absurdities. For a discussion of the evil effects of this stupidity 
see O. Jespersen: Growth and Structure of the English Language, 3rd ed.; 
Leipzig, 1919, p. 125 et seq. See also The English Language in America, by 
Harry Morgan Ayres, in The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. iv; 
New York, 1921. 


4 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


bred in tbe colloquial Onmun, may master tbe literary Korean- 
Chinese, but be never thinks in it or quite feels it. 

This fact, I daresay, is largely responsible for tbe notorious failure 
of our schools and colleges to turn out pupils who can put their 
ideas into words with simplicity and intelligibility. What their 
professors try to teach is not their mother-tongue at all, but a dialect 
that stands quite outside their common experience, and into which 
they have to translate their thoughts, consciously and painfully. 
Bad writing consists in making the attempt, and failing through 
lack of practise. Good writing consists, as in the case of Howells, in 
deliberately throwing overboard the principles so elaborately incul¬ 
cated, or, as in the case of Lincoln, in standing unaware of them. 
Thus the study of the language he is supposed to use, to the aver¬ 
age American, takes on a sort of bilingual character. On the one 
hand, he is grounded abominably in a grammar and syntax that 
have always been largely artificial, even in the country where they 
are supposed to prevail, and on the other hand he has to pick up 
the essentials of his actual speech as best he may. “Literary Eng¬ 
lish,” says Van Wyck Brooks, 3 “with us is a tradition, just as Anglo- 
Saxon law with us is a tradition. They persist, not as the normal 
expressions of a race, . . . but through prestige and precedent and 
the will and habit of a dominating class largely out of touch with 
a national fabric unconsciously taking form out of school.” What 
thus goes on out of school does not interest most of the guardians 
of our linguistic morals. How and then a Charters takes a some¬ 
what alarmed peep into the materials of the vulgar speech, and now 
and then a Krapp investigates the pronunciation of actual Americans, 
but in the main there is little save a tedious repetition of nonsense. 
In no department are American universities weaker than in the de¬ 
partment of English. The aesthetic opinion that they disseminate is 
flabby and childish, and their philological work in the national lan¬ 
guage is extraordinarily lacking in enterprise. Ho attempt to de¬ 
duce the principles of vulgar American grammar from the everyday 
speech of the people has ever been made by an American philologist. 
There is no scientific study, general and comprehensive in scope, 

•America’s Coming of Age; New York, 1915, p. 15. See also the preface 
to Every-Day English, by Richard Grant White; Boston, 1881, p. xviii. 



INTRODUCTORY 


5 


of the American vocabulary, or of the influences lying at the root 
of American word-formation. No professor, so far as I know, has 
ever deigned to give the same sober attention to the sermo plebeius 
of his country that his colleagues habitually give to the pronuncia¬ 
tion of Latin, or to the irregular verbs in French. 


2 . 

The Academic Attitude 

This neglect of the vulgate by those professionally trained to 
investigate it, and its disdainful dismissal when it is considered at 
all, are among the strangest phenomena of American scholarship. 
In all other countries the everyday speech of the common people, 
and even the grotesque dialects of remote yokels, have the constant 
attention of philologists, and the laws of their growth and variation 
are elaborately studied. In France, to name but one agency, there 
is the Societe des Parlers de France, with its diligent inquiries into 
changing forms; moreover, the Academie itself is endlessly con¬ 
cerned with the subject, and is at great pains to observe and rate 
every fluctuation in popular usage. 4 There is, besides, a constant out¬ 
pouring of books by private investigators, of which “Le Langage 
Populaire,” by Henri Banche, is a good example. 6 In Germany, 
amid many other such works, there are the admirable grammars of 
the spoken speech by Dr. Otto Bremer. In Sweden there are sev¬ 
eral journals devoted to the study of the vulgate, and the government 
has granted a subvention of 7500 kronor a year to an organization 

4 The common notion that the Academie combats changes is quite erroneous. 
In the preface to the first edition of its dictionary (1694) it disclaimed any 
purpose “to make new words and to reject others at its pleasure.” In the 
preface to the second edition (1718) it confessed that “ignorance and corrup¬ 
tion often introduce manners of writing” and that “convenience establishes 
them.” In the preface to the third edition (1740) it admitted that it was 
“forced to admit changes which the public has made,” and so on. Says D. M. 
Robertson, in A History of the French Academy (London, 1910) : “The Academy 
repudiates any assumption of authority over the language with which the 
public in its own practise has not first clothed it. So much, indeed, does it 
confine itself to an interpretation merely of the laws of language that its 
decisions are sometimes contrary to its own judgment of what is either desirable 
or expedient.” 

6 Paris, 1920. 


6 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


of scholars called the Undersokningen av Svenska Folkmal, formed 
to investigate it systematically . 6 In Norway there is a widespread 
movement to overthrow the official Dano-Norwegian, and substitute 
a national language based upon the speech of the peasants . 7 In 
Spain the Real Academia Espahola de la Lengua is constantly at 
work upon its great Diccionario, Ortografia and Gramatica, and 
revises them at frequent intervals, taking in all new words as they 
appear and all new forms of old ones. And in Latin-America, to 
come nearer to our own case, the native philologists have produced 
a copious literature on the matter closest at hand, and one finds in it 
excellent works upon the Portuguese dialect of Brazil, and the 
variations of Spanish in Mexico, the Argentine, Chili, Peru, Ecua¬ 
dor, Uruguay and even Honduras and Costa Rica . 8 But in the 
United States the business has attracted little attention and less 
talent. The only existing comprehensive treatise upon the subject , 9 
if the present work be excepted, was written by a Swede trained in 
Germany and is heavy with errors and omissions. And the only 
usable dictionary of Americanisms 10 was written in England, and is 
the work of an English-born lawyer. 

I am not forgetting, of course, the early explorations of Noah 
Webster, of which much more anon, nor the labors of our later 

s Cf. Scandinavian Studies and Notes, vol. iv, no. 3, Aug., 1917, p. 258. 

T This movement won official recognition so long ago as 1885, when the 
Storthing passed the first of a series of acts designed to put the two languages 
on equal footing. Four years later, after a campaign going back to 1874, pro¬ 
vision was made for teaching the landsmaal in the schools for the training 
of primary teachers. In 1899 a professorship of the landsmaal was established 
in the University of Christiania. The school boards in the case of primary 
schools, and the pupils in the case of middle and high schools are now per¬ 
mitted to choose between the two languages, and the landsmaal has been given 
official status by the State Church. The chief impediment to its wider ac¬ 
ceptance lies in the fact that it is not, as it stands, a natural language, but 
an artificial amalgamation of peasant dialects. It was devised in 1848-50 by Ivar 
Aasen. Tide The Language Question, London Times, Norwegian Supplement, 
May 18, 1914. 

8 A number of such works are listed in the Bibliography and in Part II, Sec¬ 
tion. 3 of the .Appendix. The late Ricardo Palma, director of the Biblioteca 
Nacional at Lima, was an ardent student of American-Spanish, and tried to 
induce the Academia to adopt a long list of terms used in the Spanish of 
South America. 

8 Maximilian Scheie de Vere: Americanisms: The English of the New World: 
New York, 1872. 

10 Richard H. Thornton: An American Glossary ... 2 vols.; Phila. and Lon¬ 
don, 1912. Mr. Thornton returned to the United States after his dictionary 
was published. 



INTRODUCTORY 


7 


dictionary makers, nor the inquiries of the Amen can Dialect So¬ 
ciety, 11 nor even the occasional illuminations of such writers as 
Richard Grant White, Charles H. Grandgent, George Philip Krapp, 
Thomas R. Lounsbury and Brander Matthews. But all this pre¬ 
liminary work has left the main field almost uncharted. Webster, 
as we shall see, was far more a reformer of the American dialect 
than a student of it. He introduced radical changes into its spell¬ 
ing and pronunciation, but he showed little understanding of its 
direction and genius. One always sees in him, indeed, the teacher 
rather than the scientific inquirer; the ardor of his desire to expound 
and instruct was only matched by his infinite capacity for observing 
inaccurately, and his profound ignorance of elementary philological 
principles. In the preface to the first edition of his American Dic¬ 
tionary, published in 1828—the first in which he added the qualify¬ 
ing adjective to the title—he argued eloquently for the right of 
Americans to shape their own speech without regard to English 
precedents, but only a year before this he had told Captain Basil 
Hall 12 that he knew of but fifty genuine Americanisms—a truly 
staggering proof of his defective observation. Webster was the first 
American professional scholar, and despite his frequent engrossment 
in public concerns and his endless public controversies, there was 
always something sequestered and almost medieval about him. The 
American language that he described and argued for was seldom 
the actual tongue of the folks about him, but often a sort of Volapiik 
made up of one part faulty reporting and nine parts academic theor¬ 
izing. In only one department did he exert any lasting influence, 
and that was in the department of orthography. The fact that our 
spelling is simpler and usually more logical than the English we 
owe chiefly to him. But it is not to be forgotten that the majority 
of his innovations, even here, were not adopted, but rejected, nor 
is it to be forgotten that spelling is the least of all the factors that 
shape and condition a language. 

The same caveat lies against the work of the later makers of 
dictionaries; they have often gone ahead of common usage in the 

“Organized Feb. 19, 1889, with Dr. J. J. Child, of Harvard, as its first 
president. 

“Author of the once famous Travels in North America; London, 1820. 




8 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


matter of orthography, but they have hung back in the far more 
important matter of idiom. The defect in the work of the 
Dialect Society lies in a somewhat similar circumscription of activ¬ 
ity. Its constitution, adopted in 1889, says that “its object is 
the investigation of the spoken English of the United States and 
Canada,” but that investigation, so far, has got little beyond the 
accumulation of vocabularies of local dialects, such as they are. 
Even in this department its work is very far from finished, and the 
Dictionary of Distinctively American Speech announced years ago 
(and again in 1919) has not yet appeared. Until its collections are 
completed and synchronized, it will be impossible for its members 
to make any profitable inquiry into the general laws underlying 
the development of American, or even to attempt a classification of 
the materials common to the whole speech. The meagreness of the 
materials accumulated in the slow-moving volumes of Dialect Notes 
shows clearly, indeed, how little the American philologist is inter¬ 
ested in the language that falls upon his ears every hour of the day. 
And in Modem Language Notes that impression is reinforced, for 
its bulky volumes contain exhaustive studies of all the other living 
languages and dialects, but only an occasional essay upon American. 

Now add to this general indifference a persistent and often violent 
effort to oppose any formal differentiation of English and American, 
initiated by English purists but heartily supported by various Amer¬ 
icans, and you come, perhaps, to some understanding of the unsatis¬ 
factory state of the literature of the subject. The pioneer diction¬ 
ary of Americanisms, published in 1816 by John Pickering, a 
Massachusetts lawyer, 13 was not only criticised unkindly; it was 
roundly denounced as something subtly impertinent and corrupting, 
and even Noah Webster took a formidable fling at it. 14 Most of 
the American philologists of the early days—Witherspoon, Worces¬ 
ter, Fowler, Cobb and their like—were uncompromising advocates 
of conformity, and combated every indication of a national inde¬ 
pendence in speech with the utmost vigilance. One of their com¬ 
pany, true enough, stood out against the rest. He was George Per- 

“A Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases which Have Been Sup¬ 
posed to be Peculiar to the United States of America; Boston, 1816. 

“A Letter to the Hon. John Pickering on the Subject of His Vocabulary; 
Boston, 1817. 


INTRODUCTORY 


9 


kins Marsh, and in his “Lectures on the English Language,” 15 he 
argued that “in point of naked syntactical accuracy, the English of 
America is not at all inferior to that of England.” But even Marsh 
expressed the hope that Americans would not, “with malice pre¬ 
pense, go about to republicanize our orthography and our syntax, 
our grammars and our dictionaries, our nursery hymns (sic) and 
our Bibles” to the point of actual separation. 16 Moreover, he was a 
philologist only by courtesy; the regularly ordained schoolmasters 
were all against him. The fear voiced by William C. Fowler, pro¬ 
fessor of rhetoric at Amherst, that Americans might “break loose 
from the laws of the English language” 17 altogether, was echoed by 
the whole fraternity, and so the corrective bastinado was laid on. 
Fowler, in fact, advocated heroic measures. He declared that all 
Americanisms were “foreign words and should be so treated.” 

It remained, however, for two professors of a later day to launch 
the doctrine that the independent growth of American was not only 
immoral, but a sheer illusion. They were Richard Grant White, for 
long the leading American writer upon language questions, at least 
in popular esteem, and Thomas R. Lounsbury, for thirty-five years 
professor of the English language and literature in the Sheffield 
Scientific School at Yale, and an indefatigable controversialist. 
Both men were of the utmost industry in research, and both had 
wide audiences. White’s “Words and Their Uses,” published in 
1872, was a mine of erudition, and his “Everyday English,” fol¬ 
lowing eight years later, was another. True enough, Fitzedward 
Hall, the Anglo-Indian-American philologist, disposed of many of 
his etymologies and otherwise did execution upon him 18 but in 
the main his contentions held water. Lounsbury was also an adept 
and favorite expositor. His attacks upon certain familiar pedantries 
of the grammarians were penetrating and effective, and his two 

“4th ed., New York, 1870, p. 669. 

16 Op. cit. p. 676. 

1T The English Language; New York, 1850; rev. ed., 1855. This was the first 
American text-book of English for use in colleges. Before its publication, ac¬ 
cording to Fowler himself (rev. ed., p. xi), the language was studied only 
“superficially” and “in the primary schools.” He goes on: “Afterward, when 
older in the academy, during their preparation for college, our pupils perhaps 
despised it, in comparison with the Latin and the Greek; and in the college 
they do not systematically study the language after they come to maturity.” 

“In Recent Exemplifications of False Philology; London, 1872. 


10 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


books, “The Standard of Usage in English” and “The Standard of 
Pronunciation in English,” not to mention his excellent “History 
of the English Language” and his numerous magazine articles, 
showed a profound knowledge of the early development of the lan¬ 
guage, and an admirable spirit of free inquiry. But both of these 
laborious scholars, when they turned from English proper to Amer¬ 
ican English, displayed an unaccountable desire to deny its ex¬ 
istence altogether, and to the support of that denial they brought 
a critical method that was anything but unprejudiced. White de¬ 
voted not less than eight long articles in the Atlantic Monthly 19 
to a review of the fourth edition of John Eussell Bartlett’s American 
Glossary 20 and when he came to the end he had disposed of niner 
tenths of Bartlett’s specimens and called into question the authentic¬ 
ity of at least half of what remained. And no wonder, for his method 
was simply that of erecting tests so difficult and so arbitrary that only 
the exceptional word or phrase could pass them, and then only by a 
sort of chance. “To stamp a word or a phrase as an Americanism,” 
he said, “it is necessary to show that (1) it is of so-called ‘Ameri¬ 
can’ origin—that is, that it first came into use in the United 
States of North America, or that (2) it has been adopted in those 
States from some language other than English, or has been kept in 
use there while it has wholly passed out of use in England.” Go¬ 
ing further, he argued that unless “the simple words in compound 
names” were used in America “in a sense different from that in 
which they are used in England” the compound itself could not be 
regarded as an Americanism. The absurdity of all this is apparent 
when it is remembered that one of his rules would bar out such 
obvious Americanisms as the use of sick in place of ill, of molasses 
for treacle , and of fall for autumn, for all of these words, while 
archaic in England, are by no means wholly extinct; and that an¬ 
other would dispose of that vast category of compounds which in¬ 
cludes such unmistakably characteristic Americanisms as joy-ride, 
rake-off, show-down, up-lift, out-house, rubber-meek, chair-warmer, 
fire-eater and back-talk. 

18 Americanisms, parts i-viii, April, May, July, Sept., Nov., 1878; Jan., 
March, May, 1879. 

29 A Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the 
United States, 4th ed.; Boston, 1877. 





INTRODUCTORY 


11 


Lounsbury went even further. In the course of a series of articles 
in Harper s Magazine, in 1913, 21 be laid down the dogma that 
“cultivated speech . . . affords the only legitimate basis of com¬ 
parison between the language as used in England and in America,” 
and then went on: 

In the only really proper sense of the term, an Americanism is a word or 
phrase naturally used by an educated American which under similar conditions 
would not be used by an educated Englishman. The emphasis, it will be seen, 
lies in the word “educated.” 

This curious criticism, fantastic as it must have seemed to Euro¬ 
pean philologists, was presently reinforced, for in his fourth article 
Lounsbury announced that his discussion was “restricted to the 
written speech of educated men.” The result, of course, was a 
wholesale slaughter of Americanisms. If it was not possible to 
reject a word, like White, on the ground that some stray English 
poet or other had once used it, it was almost always possible to 
reject it on the ground that it was not admitted into the vocabulary 
of a college professor when he sat down to compose formal book- 
English. What remained was a small company, indeed—and al¬ 
most the whole field of American idiom and American grammar, so 
full of interest for the less austere explorer, was closed without even 
a peek into it. 

White and Lounsbury dominated the arena and fixed the fashion. 
The later national experts upon the national language, with a few 
somewhat timorous exceptions, pass over its peculiarities without 
noticing them. So far as I can discover, there is not a single treatise 
in type upon one of its most salient characters—the wide departure 
of some of its vowel sounds from those of orthodox English. Marsh, 
C. H. Grandgent and Robert J. Menner have printed a number 
of valuable essays upon the subject, and George Philip Krapp has 
discussed the matter incidentally in “The Pronunciation of Standard 
English in America,” but there is no work that co-ordinates these 
inquiries or that attempts otherwise to cover the field. When, in 
preparing materials for the following chapters, I sought to determine 
the history of the a-sound in America, I found it necessary to plow 


“ Feb., March, June, July, Sept. 


12 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


through scores of ancient spelling-books, and to make deductions, 
perhaps sometimes rather rash, from the works of Franklin, Web¬ 
ster and Cobb. Some time ago the National Council of Teachers 
of English appointed a Committee on American Speech and sought 
to let some light into the matter, but as yet its labors are barely 
begun and the publications of its members get little beyond prelim¬ 
inaries. Such an inquiry involves a laboriousness which should 
have attracted Lounsbury: he once counted the number of times the 
word female appears in “Vanity Fair.” But you will find only a 
feeble dealing with the question in his book on pronunciation. Nor 
is there any adequate general work (for Scheie de Vere’s is full of 
errors and omissions) upon the influences felt by American through 
contact with the languages of our millions of immigrants, nor upon 
our peculiarly rich and characteristic slang. 

Against all such enterprises, as I have said, academic opinion 
stands firmly. During the World War it seems to have taken on, if 
possible, an added firmness. Before the war, for example, Dr. 
Brander Matthews, of Columbia University, was a diligent collector 
of Americanisms, and often discussed them with much show of 
liking for them. He even used the term Briticism 22 to designate an 
English locution rejected by 100% Americans. But during the war 
he appears to have succumbed to the propaganda for British-Amer- 
ican unity launched by his employer, the eminent Anglo-Saxon 
idealist, Adolph S. Ochs, of the New York Times. I quote from one 
of his articles in the Times: 

We may rest assured that the superficial evidences of a tendency toward the 
differentiation of American-English and British-English are not so significant 
as they may appear to the unreflecting, and that the tendency itself will be 
powerless against the cohesive force of our common literature, the precious 
inheritance of both the English-speaking peoples. ... So long as the novelists 
and the newspaper men on both sides of the ocean continue to eschew Briticisms 
and Americanisms, and so long as they indulge in these localisms only in 
quotation marks, there is no danger that English will ever halve itself into 
a British language and an American language. 

” Dr. Matthews, however, did not invent this term, as is sometimes stated. 
Nor was it invented by Gilbert M. Tucker, who claims it in his American 
English; New York, 1921, p. 42. Since printing his claim Mr. Tucker has 
called my attention to the fact that the word was used by R. G. White in 
the Galaxy for March, 1868. 



INTRODUCTORY 


13 


3. 

The View of Writing Men 

Unluckily for Dr. Matthews, there is not the slightest sign that 
the novelists and newspaper men on the two sides of the ocean will 
ever bring themselves to such eschewing. On the contrary, they 
apparently delight in the use of the “localisms” he denounces, and 
the result is a growing difficulty of intercommunication. Americans, 
trained in book English and constantly reading English books and 
journals, still make their way in British-English comfortably enough, 
though now and then, no doubt, an English novel daunts them. 
But the English have a great deal more difficulty with American, 
and devote a great deal of attention to its peculiarities—often with 
very ill grace. For a long while, as we shall see in the next chap¬ 
ter, they viewed its differentiation from standard English with frank 
indignation, and sought to put an end to the process by violent de¬ 
nunciation; even so late as the period of the Civil War their chief 
spokesman saw in every Americanism that quality of abhorrent bar¬ 
barism which they looked upon as the salient mark of the American 
people. But in later years, despite a certain lingering waspishness, 
they have brought themselves to a more philosophical view, and the 
fact that American-English is definitely separating itself from Brit¬ 
ish-English is now admitted as a matter of course. The Cambridge 
History of English Literature, for example, says that the two have 
become “notably dissimilar” in vocabulary, and that American is 
splitting off into a distinct dialect. 23 The Eleventh Edition of the 
Encyclopaedia Britannica, going further, says that the two lan¬ 
guages are already so far apart that “it is not uncommon to meet with 
[American] newspaper articles of which an untravelled English¬ 
man would hardly be able to understand a sentence.” 24 A great 
many other academic authorities, including A. H. Sayce and H. W. 
and F. G. Fowler, bear testimony to the same effect, and the London 

”Vol. xiv, pp. 484-5; Cambridge, 1917. 

“Vol xxv, p. 209. 


14 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


Times gives them ironical support by arguing that the two lan¬ 
guages, though no longer one, are still “nearly allied.” 25 

On turning to the men actually engaged in writing English, and 
particularly to those aspiring to an American audience, one finds 
nearly all of them adverting, at some time or other, to the growing 
difficulties of intercommunication. William Archer, Arnold Ben¬ 
nett, W. L. George, George Moore, H. G. Wells, Edgar Jepson, H. 
N. Brailsford, Hugh Walpole, Henry W. Nevinson, E. V. Lucas, A. 
G. Gardiner, Sir Henry Newbolt, Sidney* Low, J. C. Squire, the 
Chestertons and Kipling are some of those who have dealt with the 
matter, following Dickens, Buskin, Oscar Wilde, George Augustus 
Sala and others of an elder generation. Low, in an article in the 
Westminster Gazette 26 ironically headed “Ought American to he 
Taught in Our Schools ?” has described how the latter-day British 
business man is “puzzled by his ignorance of colloquial American” 
and “painfully hampered” thereby in his handling of American 
trade. He continues: 

In the United States of North America the study of the English tongue forms 
part of the educational scheme. I gather this because I find that they have 
professors of the English language and literature there, and I note that in the 
schools there are certain hours allotted for “English” under instructors who 
specialize in that subject. This is quite right. English is still far from being 
a dead language, and our American kinsfolk are good enough to appreciate the 
fact. 

But I think we should return the compliment. We ought to learn the Ameri¬ 
can language in our schools and colleges. At present it is strangely neglected 
by the educational authorities. They pay attention to linguistic attainments 
of many other kinds, but not to this. How many thousands of youths are at 
this moment engaged in puzzling their brains over Latin and Greek grammar 
only Whitehall knows. Every well-conducted seminary has some instructor 
who is under the delusion that he is teaching English boys and girls to speak 
French with a good Parisian accent. We teach German, Italian, even Spanish, 
Russian, modern Greek, Arabic, Hindustani. For a moderate fee you can 
acquire a passing acquaintance with any of these tongues at the Berlitz Institute 
and the Gouin Schools. But even in these polyglot establishments there is 
nobody to teach you American. I have never seen a grammar of it or a 
dictionary. I have searched in vain at the booksellers for “How to Learn 
American in Three Weeks” or some similar compendium. Nothing of the sort 
exists. The native speech of one hundred millions of civilized people is as 

25 Literary Supplement, Jan. 19, 1922, p. 46. 

26 July 18, 1913. 


INTRODUCTORY 


15 


grossly neglected by the publishers as it is by the schoolmasters. You can 
find means to learn Hausa or Swahili or Cape Dutch in London more easily 
than the expressive, if difficult, tongue which is spoken in the office, the bar¬ 
room, the tram-car, from the snows of Alaska to the mouths of the Mississippi, 
and is enshrined in a literature that is growing in volume and favor every day. 

Low then quotes an extract from an American novel appearing 
serially in an English magazine—an extract including such Ameri¬ 
canisms as side-stepper, saltwater-taffy, Prince-Albert (coat), boob, 
bartender . and kidding, and many characteristically American ex¬ 
travagances of metaphor. It might be well argued, he goes on, that 
this strange dialect is as near to “the tongue that Shakespeare spoke” 
as “the dialect of Bayswater or Brixton,” but that philological fact 
does not help to its understanding. “You might almost as well 
expect him [the British business man] to converse freely with a 
Portuguese railway porter because he tried to stumble through Caesar 
when he was in the Upper Fourth at school.” 

A campaign of education is undertaken by the London news¬ 
papers whenever a new American play of the racier sort, e. g., 
Montague Glass’s “Potash and Perlmutter” or Willard Mack’s “Kick 
In,” holds the boards in the West End. The legends shown in moving- 
pictures also keep the subject alive. Some time ago, in the London 
Daily Mail, W. G. Faulkner undertook an elaborate explanation of 
common American movie terms. Mr. Faulkner assumed that most 
of his readers would understand sombrero, sidewalk, candy-store, 
freight-car, boost, elevator, boss, crook and fall (for autumn ) with¬ 
out help, but he found it necessary to define such commonplace 
Americanisms as hoodlum, hobo, bunco-steerer, rubber-neck, drum¬ 
mer, sucker, dive (in the sense of a thieves’ resort), clean-up, graft 
and to feature. Curiously enough, he proved the reality of the diffi¬ 
culties he essayed to level by falling into error as to the meanings of 
some of the terms he listed, among them dead-beat, flume, dub and 
stag. Another English expositor, apparently following him, 
thought it necessary to add definitions of hold-up, quitter, rube, 
shack, road-agent, cinch, live-wire and scab, 27 but he, too, mistook 

JT Of the words cited as still unfamiliar in England, Thornton has traced 
hobo to 1891, hold-up and bunco to 1887, dive to 1882, dead-beat to 1877, 
hoodlum to 1872, road-agent to 1866, stag to 1856, drummer to 1836 and 
flume to 1792. All of them are probably older than these references indicate. 


16 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


the meaning of dead-beat, and in addition he misdefined band¬ 
wagon and substituted get-out, seemingly an invention of hi3 own, 
for get-away. Faulkner seized the opportunity to read a homily 
upon the vulgarity and extravagance of the American language, and 
argued that the introduction of its coinages through the moving-pic¬ 
ture theatre (English, cinema) “cannot be regarded without serious 
misgivings, if only because it generates and encourages mental in¬ 
discipline so far as the choice of expressions is concerned.” Such 
warnings are common in the English newspapers. Early in 1920 the 
London Daily News began a formal agitation of the subject, and laid 
particular stress upon the menace that American moving-pictures 
offered to the purity of the English learned and used by children. 
I quote from a characteristic contribution to the discussion: 

I visited two picture theatres today for the express purpose of collecting 
slang phrases and of noticing the effect of the new language on the child as 
well as on the adult. What the villain said to the hero when the latter started 
to argue with him was, “Cut out that dope,” and a hundred piping voices 
repeated the injunction. The comic man announced his niarriage to the Belle 
of Lumbertown by saying, “I’m hitched .” . . . 

The same writer protested bitterly against the intrusion of such 
commonplace Americanisms as fire-water, daffy, forget it, and boot¬ 
legger. The Associated Press, in reporting the protest, said: 

England is apprehensive lest the vocabularies of her youth become corrupted 
through incursions of American slang. Trans-Atlantic tourists in England note 
with interest the frequency with which resort is made to “Yankee talk” by 
British song and play writers seeking to enliven their productions. Bands 
and orchestras throughout the country when playing popular music play Ameri¬ 
can selections almost exclusively. American songs monopolize the English music 
hall and musical comedy stage. It is the subtitle of the American moving 
picture film which, it is feared, constitutes the most menacing threat to the 
vaunted English purity of speech.” 


But it is not only American slang that the English observe and 
object to; they also begin to find it difficult to comprehend American- 
English on higher planes. It was H. N". Brailsford who protested 
that many of the utterances of Dr. Woodrow Wilson, during and 
after the Versailles conference, were incomprehensible to English- 

”Mail correspondence dated Jan. 22, 1920. 


INTRODUCTORY 


17 


men on linguistic grounds. “The irruption of Mr. Wilson upon our 
scene,” he said, 29 “threatens to modify our terminology. If one 
knew the American language (as I do not),” and so on. At about 
the same time a leading English medical journal was protesting 
satirically against the Americanisms in an important American sur¬ 
gical monograph. 30 Some time before this, in the New Witness, the 
late Cecil Chesterton discussed the growing difficulty, for English¬ 
men, of understanding American newspapers. After quoting a 
characteristic headline he went on: 

I defy any ordinary Englishman to say that that is the English language 
or that he can find any intelligible meaning in it. Even a dictionary will be 
of no use to him. He must know the language colloquially or not at all. . . . 
No doubt it is easier for an Englishman to understand American than it would 
be for a Frenchman to do the same, just as it is easier for a German to under¬ 
stand Dutch than it would be for a Spaniard. But it does not make the 
American language identical with the English. 31 

Chesterton, however, refrained from denouncing this lack of 
identity; on the contrary, he allowed certain merits to American. 
“I do not want anybody to suppose,” he said, “that the American 
language is in any way inferior to ours. In some ways it has im¬ 
proved upon it in'vigor and raciness. In other ways it adheres more 
closely to the English of the best period.” Testimony to the same 
end was furnished before this by William Archer. “New words,” 
he said, “are begotten by new conditions of life; and as American 
life is far more fertile of new conditions than ours, the tendency 
toward neologism cannot but be stronger in America than in Eng¬ 
land. America has enormously enriched the language, not only with 
new words, but (since the American mind is, on the whole, quicker 
and wittier than the English) with apt and luminous colloquial 
metaphors.” 32 To which the Manchester Guardian, reviewing 
Henry G. Aikman’s “Zell,” added: “The writing is, frankly, not 

“London Daily Herald, Aug. 20, 1919. 

30 Review in the Medical Press, Sept. 17, 1919, of an article by MacCarty 
and Connor in Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics.. “In the study of the ter¬ 
minology of diseases of the breast,” says this review, “[the authors] suggest 
a scheme which seems simple, but unfortunately for British understanding it is 
written in American.” 

31 Summarized in Literary Digest, June 19, 1915. 

“Aanerican Today, Scribner’s, Feb., 1899. Sir Henry Newbolt seems to be of 
the same mind. So, I suspect, is Dr. Robert Bridges. 


18 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


English but American, and it cannot be judged by our standards. 
Some of tbe sentences are simply appalling, from our point of 
view—but they serve their purpose. This prompts tbe interesting 
speculation whether it is not time that we gave up the pretense of 
a ‘common language’ and accepted the American on its own merits.” 

The list of such quotations might be indefinitely prolonged. There 
is scarcely an English book upon the United States or an English 
review of an American book which does not offer some discussion, 
more or less profound, of American peculiarities of speech, both 
as they are revealed in spoken discourse (particularly pronunciation 
and intonation) and as they show themselves in literature and in the 
newspapers, and to this discussion protest is often added, as it very 
often is by the reviews and newspapers. “The Americans,” says a 
typical critic, “have so far progressed with their self-appointed task 
of creating an American language that much of their conversation is 
now incomprehensible to English people.” “This amazing lack of a 
sense of the beauty of words,” says another, 33 “comes from the man¬ 
ner in which the language of the United States is spoken—that 
monotonous drone, generally nasal, or that monotonous nasal whine.” 
English reviews of American books frequently refer in this way to 
the growing differences between the two dialects—in fact, it is rare 
for an English reviewer to refrain from noting and sneering at 
Americanisms. Even translations from foreign languages made by 
Americans are constantly under fire. 34 

But, now and then there appears a defender. One such is William 
Archer, already quoted, who lately protested eloquently against 
“pulling a wry face over American expressions, not because they are 
inherently bad, but simply because they are American.” He con¬ 
tinued : 

The vague and unformulated idea behind all such petty cavillings is that the 
English language is in danger of being corrupted by the importation of 
Americanisms and that it behooves us to establish a sort of quarantine in order 
to keep out the detrimental germs. This notion is simply one of the milder 

“Edgar Jepson, Little Review, Sept., 1918. 

34 For example, see the Athenamm’s review of Barrett H. Clark’s translation 
of Romain Holland’s Danton, April 4, 1919, p. 152. In the same way the anti- 
American J. C. Squire protested bitterly because an American translator of the 
Journal of the Goncourts “spoke of a pavement as a sideioalk.” See the Lit¬ 
erary Review of the New York Evening Post, July 23, 1921. 


INTRODUCTORY 


19 


phases of the Great Stupidity. The current English of today owes a great deal 
to America, and though certain American writers carry to excess the cult of 
slang, that tendency is not in the least affecting serious American literature and 
journalism. Much of the best and purest English of our time has been, and is 
being, written in America. ... If English journalists make a show of arrogant 
and self-righteous Briticism, it is quite possible that a certain class of American 
journalists may retaliate by setting afoot a deliberately anti-British movement 
and attempting (as an American has wittily put it) to “deserve well of man¬ 
kind by making two languages grow where only one grew before.” 35 

Another attorney for the defense is Richard Aldington, the 
poet. “Are Americans,” he asks, 36 “to write the language they 
speak, which is slowly but inevitably separating itself from the lan¬ 
guage of England, or are they to write a devitalized idiom learned 
painfully from hooks or from a discreet frequentation of London 
literary cliques?” Row and then, says Mr. Aldington, “one encoun¬ 
ters an American who speaks perfect standard [t. e., British] 
English, but the great majority of Americans make no attempt to 
do so.” He goes on: 

Language is made by the people; it is only fixed by writers and orators. 
When language, especially that of poetry, is too far removed from that of 
the people, it becomes conventional and hieratic, like church Latin; or languid 
and degenerate, like modern official French poetry. When language is conven¬ 
tionally used by writers it becomes burdened with cliches and dead phrases. 
If American soldiers, newspapers and popular novels are evidence, it is clear 
that the American people is evolving a new language, full of vigorous and racy 
expressions. In spite of the phenomenon of the “pure-English” American, 
mentioned above, I am compelled to believe that the majority of his countrymen 
use an idiom which differs considerably from that which he employs. Whitman 
wrote a language which is intelligible to all Englishmen (far more so than 
that of James) ; but it seems to us inaccurate, harsh and crude, for all its 
vigor and occasional rare beauty. The language of the American people— 
judging from a comparison between newspapers of the Civil War and of today 

35 Westminster Gazette, reprinted in the Literary Review of the New York 
Evening Post, July 23, 1921. 

36 English and American, Poetry: A Magazine of Terse, May, 1920, p. 94. 
For other discussions by Englishmen consult The Anglo-American Future, by 
A. G. Gardiner; New York, 1921, p. 65; Roving East and Roving West, by 
E. V. Lucas; New York, 1921, p. 129; a review of the 2nd ed. of the present 
work by H. W. Nevinson, in the Baltimore Evening Run, Feb. 11, 1922; and 
other’reviews of it in the London Observer, March 17, 1922; the London Morning 
Post, March 10, 1922; the Westminster Gazette, March 17, 1922; the Saturday 
Review March 25, 1922; the Manchester Guardian, March 28, 1922; the 
Spectator, March 25, 1922; the London Sunday Express, April 9, 1922; the 
Ration and Athenaeum, May 6, 1922; the London Outlook, May 20, 1922; also 
a review of Matthews’ Essays on English, London Sunday Times, March 19, 1922. 


20 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


.—has altered considerably in fifty years, so that a modern Whitman would 
write a language almost needing a glossary for Englishmen. Contemporary 
American poets use this popular language merely for comic effect or for pur¬ 
poses of sentimentality; most of them, since they are cultivated and rather 
literary, are careful to use a speech which is as well understood here [in 
England] as in America. Yet even in their writings there is a conception 
of the language which differs from ours. Almost all the American poets in 
“The New Poetry” anthology seem to have a feeling for words which differs 
from that of the English. In the works of Miss Lowell, for example, there 
are few usages which an Englishman would not be prepared to defend; yet 
there is an Americanism in her language, indefinable but unmistakable. Miss 
Lowell will, I think, recognize this as one of the excellencies of her work; she 
is, however, too well versed in classic English literature to have any but a 
faint trace of the quality I am trying to describe. It is more marked in Mr. 
Carl Sandberg, and still more marked in American prose; for even American 
literary criticism is a little difficult to understand, and new novels are be¬ 
wildering with vigorous hut incomprehensible expressions. Englishmen of let¬ 
ters and literary journalists may publish their exhortations and practice their 
refinements; in vain—a vast and increasingly articulate part of the English- 
speaking and English-writing -world will ignore them. Another century may 
see English broken into a number of dialects or even different languages, spoken 
in Canada, Australia, South Africa, the United States and England. The 
result may eventually be similar to the break-up of Latin. The triumph of 
any one of these languages will be partly a matter of commercial and military 
supremacy, and partly a matter of literary supremacy. 

On the western shore of the Atlantic, despite the professors of 
English, there is equal evidence of a growing sense of difference. 
“The American,” says George Ade, in his book of travel, “In Pas¬ 
tures New,” “must go to England in order to learn for a dead cer¬ 
tainty that he does not speak the English language. . . . This piti¬ 
ful fact comes home to every American when he arrives in London— 
that there are two languages, the English and the American. One is 
correct; the other is incorrect. One is a pure and limpid stream; 
the other is a stagnant pool swarming with bacilli.” 37 This was 
written in 1906. Twenty-five years earlier Mark Twain had made 
the same observation. “When I speak my native tongue in its 
utmost purity in England,” he said, “an Englishman can’t under¬ 
stand me at all.” 38 The languages, continued Mark, “were iden¬ 
tical several generations ago, but our changed conditions and the 

37 In Pastures New; New York, 1906, p. 6. 

“Concerning the American Language, in The Stolen White Elephant; Boston, 
1882. A footnote says that the essay is “part of a chapter crowded out of A 
Tramp Abroad.” . (Hartford, 1880.) 



INTRODUCTORY 


21 


spread of our people far to the south and far to the west have made 
many alterations in our pronunciation, and have introduced new 
words among us and changed the meanings of old ones.” Even 
before this the great humorist had marked and hailed these differ¬ 
ences. Already in “Roughing It” he was celebrating “the vigorous 
new vernacular of the occidental plains and mountains,” 39 and in 
all his writings, even the most serious, he deliberately engrafted its 
greater liberty and more fluent idiom upon the stem of English, and 
so lent the dignity of his high achievement to a dialect that was as 
unmistakably American as'the point of view underlying it. 

The same tendency is plainly visible in William Dean Howells. 
His novels are mines of American idiom, and his style shows an 
undeniable revolt against the trammels of English grammarians. 
In 1886 he made a plea in Harper’s for a concerted effort to put 
American-on its own legs. “If we bother ourselves,” he said, “to 
write what the critics imagine to be ‘English/ we shall be priggish 
and artificial, and still more so if we make our Americans talk 
‘English.’ . . . On our lips our continental English will differ more 
and more from the insular English, and we believe that this is not 
deplorable but desirable.” 40 Howells then proceeded to discuss the 
nature of the difference, and described it accurately as determined 
by the greater rigidity and formality of the English of modern 
England. In American, he said, there was to be seen that easy 
looseness of phrase and gait which characterized the English of the 
Elizabethan era, and particularly the Elizabethan hospitality to 
changed meanings and bold metaphors. American, he argued, made 
new words much faster than English, and they were, in the main, 
words of much greater daring and savor. 

Howells’ position was supported by that of many other well-known 
American authors of his generation, including especially Lowell, 
Whitman and John Fiske. Fiske, always truculent, carried the war 
into Africa by making a bold attack upon Briticisms, and even upon 
English pronunciation and intonation. “The English,” he said in 
1873, “talk just like the Germans. So much guttural is very unpleas¬ 
ant, especially as half the time I can’t understand them, and have to 

” Hartford, 1872, p. 45. 

40 The Editor’s Study, Harper’s Magazine, Jan., 1886. 



22 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


say, ‘I beg your pardon V ” 41 In more recent days there have been 
many like defiances. Brander Matthews, as I have said, was an eager 
apologist for Americanisms until he joined the Ochs lodge of Angles 
Saxon brothers. Others in the forefront of the fray are Dr. Richard 
Burton and Rupert Hughes. “Who can doubt,” says Dr. Burton, 
“that Mr. Mencken is right in speaking of the ‘American language’ ? 
. . . One recalls the cowboy who made a trip to Paris and was asked 
by his bunkie on returning to the big plains, how he had got along 
with French; to which he answered: ‘I got along fine, but the French 
had a hell of a time.’ English has that sort of time in the United 
States, but the people are perfectly happy about it. Why worry ? 
A few professors are hired, at very small pay, to do that, and the 
populace prefers to do its suffering vicariously. . . . When a mayor 
of a large western city says has went twice in a public speech, and a 
governor of a great eastern state in public utterances declares that 
‘it ain’t in my heart to hurt any man,’ it gives one a piquant sense 
of the democracy of language in these United States. ... We get a 
charming picture of proletariat and pedants amiably exchanging 
idiom, while school lamin’ goes glimmering, and go-as-you-please 
is the order of the day. Why bother about the form of sentences 
when vital questions are for settling, and when to make others under¬ 
stand your meaning is the main purpose of words ? That, at least, 
appears to be the general view. Ho wonder Brander Matthews speaks 
of English as a grammarless tongue. America has done and is 
doing her full share to make it so.” 42 Dr. Burton continues: 

The pundit, the pedant, and the professor who are fain to stem the turbid tide 
of popular vernacular may suffer pain; but they can have little influence on 
the situation. Even college-bred folk revert to type and use people’s speech— 
when they are out from under the restraining, corrective monitions of academic 
haunts—in a way to shock, amuse, or encourage, according to the point of 
view. Artificial book-speech is struggled for in recitation halls; then forth 
issue the vital young, and just beyond the door real talk is heard once more: 
the words and sentences that come hot from the heart, eagerly from emotional 
reactions, spontaneously representing the feelings rather than a state of mind 
supposed to be proper. To see a pupil who on trial solemnly declares that two 
nouns call for a plural verb, hasten out into the happy sunshine and imme¬ 
diately begin to do what the race always has done—including truly idiomatic 

“ J. S. Clarke’s Life of Fiske, vol. i, p. 431. 

42 English as She is Spoke, Bookman, July, 1920. 


INTRODUCTORY 


23 


writers—namely, use a singular verb on all such occasions, is only depressing 
to those who place the letter before the spirit which is life. 

Mr. Hughes is even more emphatic. There must be an end, he 
argues, to all weak submission to English precept and example. What 
is needed is a a new Declaration of Independence.” Then he goes 
on: 43 

Could anyone imagine an English author hesitating to use a word because 
of his concern as to the ability of American readers to understand it and 
approve it? The mere suggestion is fantastic. Yet it is the commonest thing 
imaginable for an American author to wonder if the word that interests him 
is good “English,” or, as the dictionaries say, “colloquial U. S.” The critics, 
like awe-inspiring and awe-inspired governesses, take pains to remind their 
pupils that Americanisms are not nice, and are not written by well-bred little 
writers. When you stop to think of it, isn’t this monstrously absurd, con¬ 
temptible, and servilely colonial? . . . Why should we fail to realize that all 
our arts must be American to be great? Why should we permit the survival 
of the curious notion that our language is a mere loan from England, like a 
copper kettle that we must keep scoured and return without a dent? Have 
we any less right to develop the language we brought away with us than 
they have who stayed behind? 

Mr. Hughes, whose own novels are full of racy and effective Ameri¬ 
canisms, describes some of his difficulties in England. “A London 
publisher,” he says, “once wrote of a book of mine that it was bewil¬ 
dering in its Americanism. He instanced, among others, the verb 
tiptoed as an amazing and incredible thing. On tiptoe, or a-tiptoe, 
he could well understand because he had seen it in print at home. 
But the well-recognized truth that our language is largely made up 
of interchangeable facts did not calm his dismay. We know what 
a foot is; therefore we can say ‘she footed it gracefully/ or speak of 
foot-troops or footers. To toe the mark is a legitimate development 
from the noun toe. Tiptoed is a simple employment of the franchise 
of our language, a franchise that Shakespeare and countless others 
have taken full advantage of. In fact, Richardson used it in 
‘Clarissa Harlowe’ as far back as 1747: ‘Mabel tiptoed it to her 
door.’ But even if he did not, why should not I ?” Mr. Hughes is 
bitter against the “snobbery that divides our writers into two sharp 
classes—those who in their effort to write pure English strut pom- 

43 Our Statish Language, Harper’s Magazine, May, 1920, p. 846. 


24 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


pously and uneasily in Piccadilly fashions, and those who in their 
effort to be true to their own environment seem to wear overalls and 
write with a nasal twang.” Between the two extremes he evidently 
prefers the latter. “Americans who try to write like Englishmen,” 
he says, “are not only committed to an unnatural pose, but doomed 
as well to failure, above all among the English; for the most likable 
thing about the English is their contempt for the hyphenated imita¬ 
tion Englishmen from the States, who only emphasize their nativity 
by their apish antics. The Americans who have triumphed among 
them have been, almost without exception, peculiarly American.” 
Finally, he repeats his clarion call for a formal rebellion, saying: 

But let us sign a Declaration of Literary Independence and formally begin 
to write, not British, but Unitedstatish. For there is such a language, a bril¬ 
liant, growing, glowing, vivacious, elastic language for which we have no 
specific name. We might call it Statesish, or for euphony condense it to 
Statish. But, whatever we call it, let us cease to consider it a vulgar dialect 
of English, to be used only with deprecation. Let us study it in its splendid 
efflorescence, be proud of it, and true to it. Let us put off livery, cease to be 
the butlers of another people’s language, and try to be the masters and the 
creators of our own. 

Meanwhile, various Americans imitate John Fiske by abandoning 
the defense for the attack. When, in 1919, a British literary 
paper 44 presumed to criticise the Americanisms in American adver¬ 
tisements, the editor of the Indianapolis Star replied with a vigorous 
denunciation of current Briticisms. “In British fiction,” he said, 
“with the omission of a few writers rated as first class, badly con¬ 
structed and even ungrammatical sentences are by no means uncom¬ 
mon, and even the books of the ‘big* authors are not immune from 
criticism. As for slang, certain colloquialisms and peculiarities of 
English speech appear so frequently in even the pages of Wells and 
Galsworthy as to be irritating. Right-o is an example; bloody and 
beastly, as applied to commonplace happenings, are others; the use 
of directly with a meaning quite unlike our usage, and many more of 
their kind, jump at American readers from the pages of English 
novels, and are there usually without intent of the writers to put 
color or accuracy into their delineations, but merely as a part of their 

44 M. A. B., Nov., 1919, p. 288. The rejoinder is reprinted in the March, 1920, 
issue, p. 107. 





INTRODUCTORY 


25 


ordinary vocabulary and with unconsciousness of any differences 
between their own and American usages.” 

Other Americans remain less resolute, for example, Vincent 
O’Sullivan, whose English schooling may account for his sensitive¬ 
ness. In America, he says in the London New Witness/ 5 “the 
English literary tradition is dying fast, and the spoken, and to a 
considerable extent, the written language is drawing farther and 
farther away from English as it is used in England.” He continues: 

To most English people, many pages of the published sermons of Billy Sunday, 
the evangelist, would be almost as unintelligible as a Welsh newspaper. But 
is American at its present point of development a language or a lingo? 
Professor Brander Matthews does not hesitate to liken it to Elizabethan 
English for its figurative vigour. American figures, however, are generally on 
a low level. When Bacon calls floods great winding-sheets, he is more impressive 
than when the Pennsylvania Railroad announces that there is a wash-out down 
’round Harrisburg, Pa. It would, in fact, be impossible to express any grand or 
moving thought in American; humour, homely wisdom, yes; but not grandeur. 
Leaving aside the intellectual value of either, Bishop Latimer’s sermons are in 
the plain language of his time, and they easily maintain themselves on heights 
that Billy Sunday never gets a clutch on, even for a moment. It is a fair 
claim that American is more vivid than English. 4 ® 

So much for the literati. The plain people of the two countries, 
whenever they come into contact, find it very difficult to exchange 
ideas. This was made distressingly apparent when American troops 
began to pour into France in 1917. Fraternizing with the British 
was impeded, not so much because of old animosities as because of 
the wide divergence in vocabulary and pronunciation between the 
doughboy and Tommy Atkins—a divergence interpreted by each as 
a sign of uncouthness in the other. The Y. M. C. A. made a charac¬ 
teristic effort to turn the resultant feeling of strangeness and home¬ 
sickness among the Americans to account. In the Chicago Tribune’s 
Paris edition of July 7, 1917, I find a large advertisement inviting 

<s Sept. 12, 1919. 

48 The question is often (and sometimes violently) discussed in American 
journals. Typical articles are Our Barbarous Lingo, by John Macy, Nation, 
April 12, 1922, and a review of the 2nd ed. of the present work by P. B. 
McDonald, Mining and Scientific Press, March 11, 1922. William McFee, a 
Scotchman now domiciled in the United States, attacked my main contentions 
in the Bookman (New York), Jan., 1922. Frequent denunciations of the doc¬ 
trine that English and American differ appear in the Anglophile newspapers, 
especially the Boston Evening Transcript, the Springfield Republican, the Chris¬ 
tian Science Monitor and the New York Times. 


26 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


them to make use of the Y. M. C. A. clubhouse in the Avenue Mon¬ 
taigne, “where American is spoken.” At about the same time an 
enterprising London tobacconist, Peters by name, affixed a large sign 
bearing the legend “American spoken here” to the front of his shop, 
and soon he was imitated by various other London, Liverpool and 
Paris shop-keepers. Earlier in the war the Illinoiser Staats- 
Zeitung , no doubt seeking to keep the sense of difference alive, adver¬ 
tised that it would “publish articles daily in the American lan¬ 
guage.” 


4 . 


Foreign Observers 

What English and American laymen have thus observed has not 
escaped the notice of Continental philologists. The first edition of 
Bartlett, published in 1848, brought forth a long and critical review 
in the Archiv fur das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literar 
turen by Prof. Felix Eliigel, and in the successive volumes of the 
Archiv there have been many valuable essays upon Americanisms, 
by such men as Herrig, Kohler and Kartzke. Various Dutch phil¬ 
ologists, among them Barentz, Keijzer and Van der Voort, have also 
discussed the subject, and a study in French has been published by 
G. A. Barranger. 47 The literature in German is becoming very 
extensive, and there have been contributions to it of late by philolo¬ 
gists of high standing, notably Prof. Dr. Heinrich Spies, of Greifs- 
wald, and Dr. Georg Kartzke, of Berlin. Dr. Spies delivered a 
course of lectures at Greifswald in February, 1921, which covered 
the whole field of current English, and especially the matter of its 
neologisms; 48 he is an eager and very shrewd student of American 
speech-habits, as is Dr. Kartzke. Two other foreign scholars who 
show more interest in American English than is usually displayed 
at home are Prof. Wincenty Lutoslawski, of the University of Wilna 
in Poland, and Prof. Sanki Ichikawa, of the Imperial University at 

47 fitude sur l’Anglais Parle aux liltats Unis (la Langue Americaine), Actes 
de la Societe Philologique de Paris, March, 1874. 

4S A summary of these lectures has been printed by Julius Beltz, at 
Langensalza. 


INTRODUCTORY 


27 


Tokyo. The last edition of the present work brought me into pleas¬ 
ant contact with the two last-named, and I have received valuable 
suggestions from both. Says Dr. Ichikawa: 

It is a great question with us teachers of English in Japan whether we 
should teach American English or British English. We have more opportunities 
for coming into contact with Americans than for meeting Englishmen, but 
on the other hand books on phonetics are mostly done by English scholars. 
As to vocabulary, we are teaching English and American indiscriminately— 
many of us, perhaps, without knowing which is which. 


Apparently, the same difficulty has appeared in France. In 1921 
the University of Paris sought to meet it by appointing two new 
lecturers—M. de Selencourt as lecteur d’anglais and M. Koy P. 
Bowey as lecteur d’americain. 

That, even to the lay Continental, American and English now 
differ considerably, is demonstrated by the fact that many of the 
popular German Sprachfuhrer appear in separate editions, Amerir 
kanisch and Englisch. This is true, for example, of the “Metoula- 
Sprachfiihrer” 49 and of the “Polyglott Kuntze” books. 50 The Ameri¬ 
can edition of the latter starts off with the doctrine that <c Jeder, 
der nach Nord-Amerika oder Australien will, muss Englisch konnen,” 
but a great many of the words and phrases that appear in its 
examples would be unintelligible to most Englishmen— e. g., free- 
lunch, real-estate agent, buckwheat, corn (for maize), conductor and 
popcorn —and a number of others would suggest false meanings or 
otherwise puzzle— e. g., saloon, wash-stand, water-pitcher and apple- 
pie . 51 In the “Neokosmos Sprachfuhrer durch England-Amerika” 52 
there are many notes calling attention to differences between Ameri¬ 
can and English usage, e. g., baggage-luggage, car-carriage, conduc- 

49 Metoula-Sprachfuhrer . . . Englisch von Karl Blattner; Ausgabe fur 
Amerika; Berlin-Schoneberg, 1912. 

“Polyglott Kuntze; Schnellste Erlernung jeder Sprache ohne Lehrer; 
Amerikanisch; Bonn a. Rh., n. d. 

61 Like the English expositors of American slang this German falls into 
several errors. For example, he gives cock for rooster, boots for shoes, braces 
for suspenders and postman for letter-carrier, and lists ironmonger, joiner and 
linen-draper as American terms. He also spells wagon in the English manner, 
with two g , s, and translates schweinefiisse as pork-feet. But he spells such 
words as color in the American manner and gives the pronunciation of clerk 
as the American klork, not as the English klark. 

“By Carlo di Domizio and Charles M. Smith; Munich, n. d. 


28 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


tor-guard. The authors are also forced to enter into explanations of 
the functions of the boots in an English hotel and of the cleric in an 
American hotel, and they devote a whole section, now mainly archaic, 
to a discourse upon the nature and uses of such American beverages 
as wliiskey-sours. Martini-cocktails, silver-fizzes, John-Collinses, and 
ice-cream sodas. 53 In other works of the same sort there is a like 
differentiation between English and American. So long ago as 1912, 
an American of German ancestry, Alfred D. Schoch, of Bonne- 
terre, Mo., published in Germany an American version of Prof. Dr. 
R. Kron’s very popular little handbook, “The Little Londoner,” 
and it remains to this day a valuable glossary of Americanisms, 
particularly in the department of idiom. 54 More recently a group of 
Scandinavian American scholars have printed a work upon the 
United States, in Dano-Norwegian, in which an important chapter 
is devoted to the national speech. 55 A vocabulary of Americanisms 
unknown in England is appended; in it I find butterine, cat-boat, 
clawhammer, co-ed, crags, dago, dumbwaiter, faker, freeze-out, gusher, 
hard-cider, hen-party, jitney, mortician, panhandle, patrolman, sam¬ 
ple-room, shyster, sleuth, wet (noun), dry (noun), head-cheese and 
overhead-expenses. The guide-books for tourists almost always dif¬ 
ferentiate between the English and American vocabularies. Bae¬ 
deker’s “United States” has a glossary for Englishmen likely to be 
daunted by such terms as el, European-plan and sundae, and in 
Muirhead’s “London and Its Environs” there is a corresponding one 
for Americans unfamiliar with bank-holiday, hoarding and trunk- 
call. Asiatics are equally observant of the fast-growing differences. 
In the first number of the Moslem Sunrise, a quarterly edited by Dr. 
Mufti Muhammad Sadig, there is an explanatory note, apparently 
for the guidance of East Indian Mohammedan missionaries in the 
United States, upon certain peculiarities of the American vocabu¬ 
lary. 

63 Like the Metoula expositor they make mistakes. Certainly no American 
bartender ever made a Hock- cup; he made a Rhine-wine-cup. They list several 
drinks that were certainly not very well known in America in the old days, e. g., 
the knickebein and the white-lion. They convert julep into jules —a foul blow, 
indeed! 

64 The Little Yankee: a Handbook of Idiomatic American English; Freiburg 
i. B., 1912. 

65 It is by Dr. A. Th. Dorf, of Chicago. The book is De Forenede Stater: 
Landet og Folket. The editor is Prof. Evald Kristensen, of Atterdag College, 
Solvang, California, and the publisher is Axel H. Anderson, of Omaha, Neb. 


INTRODUCTORY 


29 


Most Continental Europeans who discuss the matter seem to take 
it for granted that American and English are now definitely sepa¬ 
rated. When I was in Germany as a correspondent, in 1917, I met 
many German officers who spoke English fluently. Some had learned 
it in England and some in America, and I noted that they were fully 
conscious of the difference between the two dialects, and often re¬ 
ferred to it. M. Clemenceau, who acquired a very fluent and idio¬ 
matic English during his early days in New York, is always at pains 
to inform those who compliment him upon it that it is not English 
at all, but American. The new interest in American literature in 
France, growing out of the establishment of a chair of American 
Literature and Civilization at the Sorbonne, with Charles Cestre as 
incumbent, has brought forth several articles upon the peculiarities 
of American in the French reviews. Early in May, 1920, in dis¬ 
cussing “La Poesie americaine d’aujourd’hui” in Les Marges, Eugene 
Montfort argued that American showed every sign of being more 
vigorous than English, and would eventually take on complete auton¬ 
omy. A philologist of Scandinavian extraction, Elias Molee, has gone 
so far as to argue that the acquisition of correct English, to a people 
grown so mongrel in blood as the Americans, has already become a 
useless burden. In place of it he proposes a mixed tongue, based on 
English, but admitting various elements from the other Germanic 
languages. His grammar, however, is so much more complex than 
that of English that most Americans would probably find his artificial 
“American” very difficult of acquirement. At all events it has made 
no progress. 56 


5. 


The General Character of American English 

The characters chiefly noted in American speech by all who have 
discussed it, are, first, its general uniformity throughout the 
country, so that dialects, properly speaking, are confined to recent 

6B Molee’s notions are set forth in Plea for an American Language . . . ; 
Chicago, 1888; and Tutonish; Chicago, 1902. He announced the preparation of 
a Dictionary of the American Language in 1888, but so far as I know it has 
not been published. He was born in Wisconsin, of Norwegian parents, in 1845, 
and pursued linguistic studies at the University of Wisconsin, where he seems 
to have taken a Ph.B. 



30 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


immigrants, to the native whites of a few isolated areas and to the 
negroes of the South; and, secondly, its impatient disregard of rule 
and precedent, and hence its large capacity (distinctly greater than 
that of the English of England) for taking in new words and phrases 
and for manufacturing new locutions out of its own materials. The 
first of these characters has struck every observer, native and foreign. 
In place of the local dialects of other countries we have a general 
Volkssprache for the whole nation, and if it is conditioned at all it i3 
only by minor differences in pronunciation and by the linguistic 
struggles of various groups of newcomers. “The speech of the 
United States,” says Gilbert M. Tucker, “is quite unlike that of 
Great Britain in the important particular that here we have no 
dialects.” 57 “We all,” said Mr. Taft during his presidency, “speak 
the same language and have the same ideas.” “Manners, morals and 
political views,” said the New York 1 World, commenting upon this 
dictum, “have all undergone a standardization which is one of the 
remarkable aspects of American evolution. Perhaps it is in the 
uniformity of language that this development has been most note¬ 
worthy. Outside of the Tennessee mountains and the back country 
of New England there is no true dialect.” 58 “While we have or have 
had single counties as large as Great Britain,” says another American 
observer, “and in some of our states England could be lost, there is 
practically no difference between the American spoken in our 
4,039,000 square miles of territory, except as spoken by foreigners. 
We, assembled here, would be perfectly understood by delegates from 
Texas, Maine, Minnesota, Louisiana, or Alaska, from whatever walk 
of life they might come. We can go to any of the 75,000 postoffices 
in this country and be entirely sure we will be understood, whether 
we want to buy a stamp or borrow a match.” 59 “From Portland, 
Maine, to Portland, Oregon,” agrees an English critic, “no trace of 
a distinct dialect is to be found. The man from Maine, even though 
he may be of inferior education and limited capacity, can completely 
understand the man from Oregon.” 60 To which add the testimony 

67 American English, North American Review, Jan., 1883. 

68 Oct. 1, 1909. 

58 J. F. Healy, general manager of the Davis Colliery Co. at Elkins, W. Va., 
in a speech before the West Virginia Coal Mining Institute, at Wheeling, Dec., 
1910; reprinted as The American Language; Pittsburgh, 1911. 

®° Westminster Review, July, 1888, p. 35. 


INTRODUCTORY 


31 


of a Scandinavian: “In the small country of Denmark it is some¬ 
times difficult for an islander to understand a Jutlander. Every 
county has its own expression; every province its own dialect. In 
England we find not only more than 200 dialects, but also entire 
language groups, distinct from one another in their roots, despite 
the fact that the land itself is certainly not large. But in the United 
States one may travel over the greater part of a continent without 
encountering a single dialect. The language is the same from ocean 
to ocean.” 61 

Ho other country can show such linguistic solidarity, nor any 
approach to it—not even Canada, for there a large part of the popu¬ 
lation resists learning English altogether. The Little Russian of the 
Ukraine is unintelligible to the citizen of Petrograd; the Northern 
Italian can scarcely follow a conversation in Sicilian; the Low Ger¬ 
man from Hamburg is a foreigner in Munich; the Breton flounders 
in Gascony. Even in the United Kingdom there are wide diver¬ 
gences. 62 “When we remember,” says the New International Ency¬ 
clopedia, 63 “that the dialects of the countries (sic) in England have 
marked differences—so marked, indeed, that it may be doubted 
whether a Lancashire miner and a Lincolnshire farmer could under¬ 
stand each other—we may well be proud that our vast country has, 
strictly speaking, only one language.” This uniformity was noted 
by the earliest observers; Pickering called attention to it in the 
preface to his Vocabulary and ascribed it, no doubt accurately, to 
the restlessness of the Americans, their inheritance of the immigrant 
spirit, “the frequent removals of people from one part of our country 
to another.” It is especially marked in vocabulary and gra mm atical 
forms—the foundation stones of a living speech. There may be 
slight differences in pronunciation and intonation—a Southern soft¬ 
ness, a Yankee drawl, a Western burr—but in the words they use 
and the way they use them all Americans, even the least tutored, 
follow the same line. One observes, of course, a polite speech and 
a common speech. But the common speech is everywhere the same, 

“Dr. A. Th. Dorf, in De Forenede Stater; Omaha, Neb., 1921, p. 207. 

83 W. W. Skeat distinguishes 9 principal dialects in Scotland, 3 in Ireland 
and 30 in England and Wales. Vide English Dialects from the Eighth Century 
to the Present Day; Cambridge, 1911, p. 107 ff. 

63 Art. Americanisms, 2nd ed. 


32 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


and its uniform vagaries take the place of the dialectic variations of 
other lands. A Boston street-car conductor could go to work in 
Chicago or San Francisco without running the slightest risk of 
misunderstanding his new fares. Once he had picked up half a 
dozen localisms, he would be, to all linguistic intents and purposes, 
fully naturalized. 

Of the intrinsic differences that separate American from English 
the chief have their roots in the obvious disparity between the environ¬ 
ment and traditions of the American people since the seventeenth 
century and those of the English. The latter have lived under a 
relatively stable social order, and it has impressed upon their souls 
their characteristic respect for what is customary and of good report. 
Until the Great War brought chaos to most of their institutions, 
their whole lives were regulated, perhaps more than those of any 
other people save the Spaniards, by a regard for precedent. The 
Americans, though partly of the same blood, have felt no such 
restraint, and acquired no such habit of conformity. On the con¬ 
trary, they have plunged to the other extreme, for the conditions of 
life in their new country have put a high value upon the precisely 
opposite qualities of curiosity and daring, and so they have acquired 
that character of restlessness, that impatience of forms, that disdain 
of the dead hand, which now broadly marks them. From the first, 
says a recent literary historian, they have been “less phlegmatic, 
less conservative than the English. There were climatic influences, 
it may be; there was surely a spirit of intensity everywhere that made 
for short effort.” 64 Thus, in the arts, and thus in business, in poli¬ 
tics, in daily intercourse, in habits of mind and speech. The Ameri¬ 
can is not, in truth, lacking in a capacity for discipline; he has it 
highly developed; he submits to leadership readily, and even to 
tyranny. But, by a curious twist, it is not the leadership that is old 
and decorous that fetches him, but the leadership that is new and 
extravagant. He will resist dictation out of the past, but he will 
follow a new messiah with almost Russian willingness, and into the 
wildest vagaries of economics, religion, morals and speech. A new 
fallacy in politics spreads faster in the United States than anywhere 

S4 F. L. Pattee: A History of American Literature Since 1870; New York, 
1916. See also The American Novel, by Carl Van Doren; New York, 1921. 



INTRODUCTORY 


33 


else on earth, and so does a new fashion in hats, or a new revelation 
of God, or a new means of killing time, or a new shibboleth, or 
metaphor, or piece of slang. 

Thus the American, on his linguistic side, likes to make his lan¬ 
guage as he goes along, and not all the hard work of his grammar 
teachers can hold the business back. A novelty loses nothing by the 
fact that it is a novelty; it rather gains something, and particularly 
if it meets the national fancy for the terse, the vivid, and, above all, 
the bold and imaginative. The characteristic American habit of 
reducing complex concepts to the starkest abbreviations was already 
noticeable in colonial times, and such highly typical Americanisms 
as 0. K., N. G., and P. D. Q., have been traced back to the first days 
of the republic. Nor are the influences that shaped these early 
tendencies invisible today, for the country is still in process of growth, 
and no settled social order has yet descended upon it. Institution¬ 
making is yet going on, and so is language-making. In so modest 
an operation as that which has evolved bunco from buncombe and 
bunk from bunco there is evidence of a phenomenon which the phil¬ 
ologist recognizes as belonging to the most youthful and lusty stages 
of speech. 

But of more importance than the sheer inventions, if only because 
much more numerous, are the extensions of the vocabulary, both abso¬ 
lutely and in ready workableness, by the devices of rhetoric. The 
American, from the beginning, has been the most ardent of recorded 
rhetoricians. His politics bristles with pungent epithets; his whole 
history has been bedizened with tall talk; his fundamental institu¬ 
tions rest as much upon brilliant phrases as upon logical ideas. And 
in small things as in large he exercises continually an incomparable 
capacity for projecting hidden and often fantastic relationships into 
arresting parts of speech. Such a term as rubbermeck is almost a 
complete treatise on American psychology; it reveals the national 
habit of mind more clearly than any labored inquiry could ever reveal 
it. It has in it precisely the boldness and contempt for ordered forms 
that are so characteristically American, and it has too the grotesque 
humor of the country, and the delight in devastating opprobriums, 
and the acute feeling for the succinct and savory. The same qualities 
are in rough-house, water-wagon, near-silk, has-been, lame-duck and 


34 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


a thousand other such racy substantives, and in all the great stock of 
native verbs and adjectives. There is, indeed, but a shadowy boun¬ 
dary in these new coinages between the various parts of speech. 
Corral, borrowed from the Spanish, immediately becomes a verb and 
the father of an adjective. Bust, carved out of burst, erects itself 
into a noun. Bum, coming by way of an earlier bummer from the 
German bummler, becomes noun, adjective, verb and adverb. Verbs 
are fashioned out of substantives by the simple process of prefixing 
the preposition: to engineer, to chink, to stump, to hog. Others grow 
out of an intermediate adjective, as to boom. Others are made by 
torturing nouns with harsh affixes, as to burglarize and to itemize, 
or by groping for the root, as to resurrect and to jell. Yet others are 
changed from intransitive to transitive: a sleeping-car sleeps thirty 
passengers. So with the adjectives. They are made of substantives 
unchanged: codfish, jitney. Or by bold combinations: down-and-out, 
up-state, flat-footed. Or by shading down suffixes to a barbaric sim¬ 
plicity : scary, classy, tasty. Or by working over adverbs until they 
tremble on the brink between adverb and adjective: right and near 
are examples. 

All of these processes, of course, are also to be observed in the 
English of England; in the days of its great Elizabethan growth 
they were in the lustiest possible being. They are, indeed, common 
to all tongues; “the essence of language,” says Dr. Jespersen, “is 
activity.” But if you will put the English of today beside the 
American of today you will see at once how much more forcibly 
they are in operation in the latter than in the former. The standard 
southern dialect of English has been arrested in its growth by its 
purists and grammarians. It shows no living change in structure 
and syntax since the days of Anne, and very little modification in 
either pronunciation or vocabulary. Its tendency is to conserve 
that which is established; to say the new thing, as nearly as possible, 
in the old way; to combat all that expansive gusto winch made for 
its pliancy and resilience in the days of Shakespeare. In place of 
the old loose-footedness there is set up a preciosity which, in one 
direction, takes the form of unyielding affectations in the spoken 
language, and in another form shows itself in the heavy Johnsonese 
of current English writing—the Jargon denounced by Sir Arthur 



INTRODUCTORY 


35 


Quiller-Couch in his Cambridge lectures. This “infirmity of 
speech” Quiller-Couch finds “in parliamentary debates and in the 
newspapers”; . . . “it has become the medium through which 
Boards of Government, County Councils, Syndicates, Committees, 
Commercial Firms, express the processes as well as the conclusions 
of their thought, and so voice the reason of their being.” Distinct 
from journalese, the two yet overlap, “and have a knack of assimilat¬ 
ing each other’s vices.” 65 

American, despite the gallant efforts of the professors, has so far 
escaped any such suffocating formalization. We, too, of course, have 
our occasional practitioners of the authentic English Jargon; in the 
late Grover Cleveland we produced an acknowledged master of it. 
But in the main our faults in writing lie in precisely the opposite 
direction. That is to say, we incline toward a directness of state¬ 
ment which, at its greatest, lacks restraint and urbanity altogether, 
and toward a hospitality which often admits novelties for the mere 
sake of their novelty, and is quite uncritical of the difference between 
a genuine improvement in succinctness and clarity, and mere 
extravagant raciness. “The tendency,” says one English observer, 
“is ... to consider the speech of any man, as any man him¬ 
self, as good as any other.” 66 “All beauty and distinction,” says 
another, 67 “are ruthlessly sacrificed to force.” “The Americans, 
in a kind of artistic exuberance,” says a third, 68 “are not afraid to 

65 Cf. the chapter, Interlude: On Jargon, in Quiller-Couch’s On the Art of 
Writing; New York, 1916. Curiously enough, large parts of the learned critic’s 
book are written in the very Jargon he attacks. See also ch. vi. of Growth and 
Structure of the English Language, by 0. Jespersen, 3rd ed. rev.; Leipzig, 1919, 
especially pp. 143 ff. See also Official English, in English, March, 1919, p. 7; 
April, p. 45, and Aug., p. 135, and The Decay of Syntax, in the London Times 
Literary Supplement, May 8, 1919, p. 1. 

“Alexander Francis: Americans: an Impression; New York, 1900. 

87 G. Lowes Dickinson, in the English Review, quoted by Gun-rent Literature, 
April, 1910. 

68 Frank Dilnot: The New America; New York, 1919, p. 25. The same author 
describes two tendencies in American, one toward the reinvigoration of English, 
the other toward its dilution and corruption. He regards the language as far 
more vivid and effective than the English of England. “Show me the alert 
Englishman,” he says, “who will not find a stimulation in those nuggety word- 
groupings which are the commonplaces in good American conversation. They 
are like flashes of crystal. They come from all kinds of people—who are bril¬ 
liantly innocent of enriching the language. . . . The written word in America 
follows generally along the lines of the spoken word. ... In writing as well as 
in speech there is a widespread range of what to an Englishman is looseness, 
occasionally slovenliness. . . . The American tongue, written or spoken, with 


36 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


use words as we sometimes are in England.” Moreover, this strong 
revolt against conventional bonds is by no means confined to the 
folk-speech, nor even to the loose conversational English of the upper 
classes; it also gets into more studied discourse, both spoken and 
written. I glance through the speeches of Dr. Woodrow Wilson, 
surely a conscientious purist and Anglomaniac if we have ever had 
one, and find, in a few moments, half a dozen locutions that an 
Englishman in like position would never dream of using, among them 
we must get a move on , 69 hog as a verb , 70 gum-shoe as an adjective 
with verbal overtones , 71 onery in place of ordinary , 72 and that is 
going some . 73 I turn to Dr. John Dewey, surely a most respectable 
pedagogue, and find him using dope for opium. 7 * 

From the earliest days, indeed, English critics have found this 
gipsy tendency in our most careful writing. They denounced it in 
Marshall, Cooper, Mark Twain, Poe, Lossing, Lowell and Holmes, 
and even in Hawthorne and Thoreau; and it was no less academic a 
work than W. C. Brownell’s “French Traits” which brought forth, 
in a London literary journal, the dictum that “the language most 
depressing to the cultured Englishman is the language of the cul¬ 
tured American.” Even “educated American English,” agrees the 
chief of modem English grammarians, “is now almost entirely inde¬ 
pendent of British influence, and differs from it considerably, though 
as yet not enough to make the two dialects—American English and 
British English—mutually unintelligible.” 75 Surely no English¬ 
man of position equal to Dr. Wilson’s or Dr. Dewey’s would venture 
upon such locutions as dope and to hog. One might conceivably think 
of George Saintsbury doing it—but Saintsbury is a privileged icono¬ 
clast. Gilbert Murray would blush to death if merely accused of it 

its alteration from the English of England, is a potent and penetrating instru¬ 
ment, rich in new vibrations, full of joy as well as shocks for the unsuspecting 
visitor.” 

" Speech before the Chamber of Commerce Convention, Washington, Feb. 19, 
1916. 

70 Speech at workingman’s dinner, New York, Sept. 4, 1912. 

71 Wit and Wisdom of Woodrow Wilson, comp, by Richard Linthicum: New 
York, 1916, p. 54. 

"Speech at Ridgewood, N. J., April 22, 1910. 

73 Wit and Wisdom . . . , p. 56. 

u New Republic , Dec. 24, 1919, p. 116, col. 1. 

TO Henry Sweet: A New English Grammar, Logical and Historical, 2 parts; 
Oxford, 1900-03, part i, p. 224. 


INTRODUCTORY 


37 


falsely. When, on August 2, 1914, Sir Edward Grey ventured 
modestly to speak of “pressing the button in the interest of peace,” 
the New Age denounced him for indulging in vulgarism, and, as one 
English correspondent writes to me, various other Britons saw in the 
locution “a sign of the impending fall of the Empire.” 

American thus shows its character in a constant experimentation, 
a wide hospitality to novelty, a steady reaching out for new and vivid 
forms. No other tongue of modern times admits foreign words and 
phrases more readily; none is more careless of precedents; none 
shows a greater fecundity and originality of fancy. It is producing 
new words every day, by trope, by agglutination, by the shedding of 
inflections, by the merging of parts of speech, and by sheer brilliance 
of imagination. It is full of what Bret Harte called the “saber-cuts 
of Saxon”; it meets Montaigne’s ideal of “a succulent and nervous 
speech, short and compact, not as much delicated and combed out 
as vehement and brusque, rather arbitrary than monotonous, not 
pedantic but soldierly, as Suetonius called Csesar’s Latin.” One 
pictures the common materials of English dumped into a pot, exotic 
flavorings added, and the bubblings assiduously and expectantly 
skimmed. What is old and respected is already in decay the moment 
it comes into contact with what is new and vivid. “When we 
Americans are through with the English language,” says Mr. 
Dooley, “it will look as if it had been run over by a musical comedy.” 
Let American confront a novel problem alongside English, and imme¬ 
diately its superior imaginativeness and resourcefulness become 
obvious. Movie is better than cinema; and the English begin to 
admit the fact by adopting the word; it is not only better American, 
it is better English. Bill-board is better than hoarding. Office¬ 
holder is more honest, more picturesque, more thoroughly Anglo- 
Saxon than 'public-servant. Stem-winder somehow has more life in 
it, more fancy and vividness, than the literal keyless-watch. Turn to 
the terminology of railroading (itself, by the way, an Americanism): 
its creation fell upon the two peoples equally, but they tackled the 
job independently. The English, seeking a figure to denominate 
the wedge-shaped fender in front of a locomotive, called it a plough; 
the Americans, characteristically, gave it the far more pungent name 
of cow-catcher. So with the casting where two rails join. The Em 




38 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


glish called it a crossing-plate. The Americans, more responsive to 
the suggestion in its shape, called it a frog. 

This boldness of conceit, of course, makes for vulgarity. Unre¬ 
strained by any critical sense—and the critical sense of the profes¬ 
sors counts for little, for they cry wolf too often—it flowers in such 
barbaric inventions as tasty, alright, go-getter, he-man, go-ahead- 
atvveness, tony, semi-occasional, to fellowship and to doxologize. 
Let it be admitted: American is not infrequently vulgar; the 
Americans, too, are vulgar (Bayard Taylor called them “Anglo- 
Saxons relapsed into semi-barbarism”) ; America itself is unutterably 
vulgar. But vulgarity, after all, means no more than a yielding to 
natural impulses in the face of conventional inhibitions, and that 
yielding to natural impulses is at the heart of all healthy language¬ 
making. The history of English, like the history of American and 
of every other living tongue, is a history of vulgarisms that, by their 
accurate meeting of real needs, have forced their way into sound 
usage, and even into the lifeless catalogues of the grammarians. 
The colonial pedants denounced to advocate as bitterly as they ever 
denounced to compromit or to happify, and all the English authori¬ 
ties gave them aid, but it forced itself into the American language 
despite them, and today it is even accepted as English and has got 
into the Concise Oxford Dictionary. To donate, so late as 1870, 
was dismissed by Bichard Grant White as ignorant and abominable 
but today there is not an American dictionary that doesn’t accept it, 
and surely no American writer would hesitate to use it. 76 Reliable, 
gubernatorial, standpoint and scientist have survived opposition of 
equal ferocity. The last-named was coined by William Whewell, an 
Englishman, in 1840, but was first adopted in America. Despite 
the fact that Fitzedward Hall and other eminent philologists used it 
and defended it, it aroused almost incredible opposition in England. 
So recently as 1890 it was denounced by the London Daily News as 

” Despite this fact an academic and ineffective opposition to it still goes on. 
On the Style Sheet of the Century Magazine it is listed among the “words and 
phrases to be avoided.” It was prohibited by the famous Index Expurgatorius 
prepared by William Cullen Bryant for the New York Evening Post, and his 
prohibition is still theoretically in force, but the word is now actually permitted 
by the Post. The Chicago Daily News Style Book, dated July 1, 1908, also 
bans it. 




INTRODUCTORY 


39 


“an ignoble Americanism,” and according to William Archer it was 
finally accepted by the English only “at the point of the bayonet.” 77 
The purist performs a useful office in enforcing a certain logical 
regularity upon the process, and in our own case the omnipresent 
example of the greater conservatism of the English corrects our 
native tendency to go too fast, but the process itself is as inexorable 
in its workings as the precession of the equinoxes, and if we yield to 
it more eagerly than the English, it is only a proof, perhaps, that the 
future of what was once the Anglo-Saxon tongue lies on this side 
of the water. “The story of English gra mm ar,” says Murison, “is 
a story of simplification, of dispensing with grammatical forms.” 78 
And of the most copious and persistent enlargement of vocabulary 
and mutation of idiom ever recorded, perhaps, by descriptive phil¬ 
ology. English now has the brakes on, but American continues to 
leap in the dark, and the prodigality of its movement is all the indi¬ 
cation that is needed of its intrinsic health, its capacity to meet the 
ever-changing needs of a restless and emotional people, constantly 
fluent in racial composition, and disdainful of tradition. “Lan¬ 
guage,” says Sayce, “is no artificial product, contained in books and 
dictionaries and governed by the strict rules of impersonal gram¬ 
marians. It is the living expression of the mind and spirit of a 
people, ever changing and shifting, whose sole standard of correct¬ 
ness is custom and the common usage of the community. . . . The 
first lesson to be learned is that there is no intrinsic right or wrong 
in the use of language, no fixed rules such as are the delight of the 
teacher of Latin prose. What is right now will be wrong hereafter, 
what language rejected yesterday she accepts today.” 79 

77 Scientist is now in the Concise Oxford Dictionary and in Cassell’s. So are 
reliable, standpoint and gubernatorial. But the Century Magazine still bans 
standpoint and the Evening Post (at least in theory) bans both standpoint and 
reliable. The Chicago Daily News accepts standpoint, but bans reliable and 
gubernatorial. All of these words, of course, are now almost as good as ox or 
and. 

78 Changes in the Language since Shakespeare’s Time, in Cambridge History 
of English Literature, vol. xiv, p. 491. See also Jespersen, op. cit. 

79 Introduction to the Science of Language, vol. ii, pp. 333-4. 



40 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


6 . 


The Materials of the Inquiry 

One familiar with the habits of pedagogues need not be told that, 
in their grudging discussions of American, they have spent most 
of their energies upon vain attempts to classify its materials. White 
and Lounsbury, as I have shown, carried the business to the limits 
of the preposterous; when they had finished identifying and cata¬ 
loguing Americanisms there were no more Americanisms left to 
study. But among investigators of less learning there is a more 
spacious view of the problem, and the labored categories of White and 
Lounsbury are much extended. Pickering, the first to attempt a list 
of Americanisms, rehearsed their origin under the following head¬ 
ings: 

1. “We have formed some new words.” 

2. “To some old ones, that are still in use in England, we have affixed new 
significations.” 

3. “Others, which have been long obsolete in England, are still retained in 
common use among us.” 

Bartlett, in the second edition of his dictionary, dated 1859, in¬ 
creased these classes to nine: 

1. Archaisms, i. e., old English words, obsolete, or nearly so, in England, 
but retained in use in this country. 

2. English words used in a different sense from what they are in England. 
“These include many names of natural objects differently applied.” 

3. Words which have retained their original meaning in the United States, 
though not in England. 

4. English provincialisms adopted into general use in America. 

5. Newly coined words, which owe their origin to the productions or to the 
circumstances of the country. 

6. Words borrowed from European languages, especially the French, Spanish, 
Dutch and German. 

7. Indian words. 

8. Negroisms. 

9. Peculiarities of pronunciation. 


Some time before this, but after the publication of Bartlett’s first 
edition in 1848, William C. Fowler, professor of rhetoric at Am- 


INTRODUCTORY 


41 


herst, devoted a brief chapter to “American Dialects” in his well- 
known work on English 80 and in it one finds the following formi¬ 
dable classification of Americanisms: 

1. Words borrowed from other languages. 

a. Indian, as Kennebec, Ohio, Toiftbigbee; sagamore, quahaug, succotash. 

b. Dutch, as boss, kruller, stoop. 

c. German, as spuke(l), sauerkraut. 

d. French, as bayou, cache, chute, crevasse, levee. 

e. Spanish, as calaboose, chaparral, hacienda, rancho, ranchero. 

f. Negro, as buckra. 

2. Words “introduced from the necessity of our situation, in order to 
express new ideas.” 

a. Words “connected with and flowing from our political institutions.' 
as selectman, presidential, congressional, oaucus, mass-meeting, lynch 
law, help (for servants ). 

b. Words “connected with our ecclesiastical institutions,” as assoch 
tional, oonsociational, to fellowship, to missionate. 

c. Words “connected with a new country,” as lot, diggings, bettet 
ments, squatter. 

3. Miscellaneous Americanisms. 

a. Words and phrases become obsolete in England, as talented, offset 
(for set-off), back and forth (for backward and forward). 

b. Old words and phrases “which are now merely provincial in Eng¬ 
land,” as hub, whap ( ?), to wilt. 

c. Nouns formed from verbs by adding the French suffix -ment, as 
publishment, releasement, requirement. 

d. Forms of words “which fill the gap or vacancy between two words 
which are approved,” as obligate (between oblige and obligation) and 
variate (between vary and variation). 

e. “Certain compound terms for which the English have different com¬ 

pounds,” as bank-bill (bank-note), book-store (bookseller’s shop), bottom¬ 
land (interval-land), clapboard (pale), sea-board (sea-shore), side-hill 

(hill-side). 

f. “Certain colloquial phrases, apparently idiomatic, and very expres¬ 
sive,” as to cave in, to flare up, to flunk out, to fork over, to hold on, 

to let on, to stave off, to take on. 

g. Intensives, “often a matter of mere temporary fashion,” as dread¬ 
ful, might, plaguy, powerful. 

h. “Certain verbs expressing one’s state of mind, but partially or 

timidly,” as to allot upon (for to count upon), to calculate, to expect 
(to think or believe), to guess, to reckon. 

i. “Certain adjectives, expressing not only quality, but one’s subjec¬ 
tive feelings in regard to it,” as clever, grand, green, likely, smart, ugly. 


80 Op. cit., pp. 119-28. 


42 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


j. Abridgments, as stage (for stage-coach ), turnpike (for turnpike- 
road), spry (for sprightly), to conduct (for to conduct one’s self). 

k. “Quaint or burlesque terms,” as to tote, to yank; humbug, loafer, 
muss, plunder (for baggage), rock (for stone). 

l. “Low expressions, mostly political,” as slangwhanger, loco foco, 
hunker; to get the hang of. 

m. “Ungrammatical expressions, disapproved by all,” as do don’t, used 
to could, can’t come it, Universal preacher (for Universalist), there’s no 
two ways about it. 

Elwyn, in 1859, attempted no classification. 81 He confined his 
glossary to archaic English words surviving in America, and sought 
only to prove that they had come down “from our remotest ancestry” 
and were thus undeserving of the reviling lavished upon them by 
English critics. Scheie de Vere, in 1872, followed Bartlett, and 
devoted himself largely to words borrowed from the Indian dialects, 
and from the French, Spanish and Dutch. But Farmer, in 1889, 82 
ventured upon a new classification, prefacing it with the following 
definition: 

An Americanism may be defined as a word or phrase, old or new, employed 
by general or respectable usage in America in a way not sanctioned by the best 
standards of the English language. As a matter of fact, however, the term has 
come to possess a wider meaning, and it is now applied not only to words and 
phrases which can be so described, but also to the new and legitimately born 
words adapted to the general needs and usages, to the survivals of an older form 
of English than that now current in the mother country, and to the racy, pun¬ 
gent vernacular of Western life. 

He then proceeded to this classification: 

1. Words and phrases of purely American derivation, embracing words 
originating in: 

а. Indian and aboriginal life. 

б. Pioneer and frontier life. 

c. The church. 

d. Politics. 

e. Trades of all kinds. 

/. Travel, afloat and ashore. 

2. Words brought by colonists, including: 

a. The German element. 

b. The French. 

81 Alfred L. Elwyn, M.D.: Glossary of Supposed Americanisms . . .; Phila., 
1859. 

“John S. Farmer: Americanisms Old and New , , London, 1889, 


INTRODUCTORY 


43 


c. The Spanish. 

d. The Dutch. 

e. The negro. 

f. The Chinese. 

3. Names of American things, embracing: 

a. Natural products. 

b. Manufactured articles. 

4. Perverted English words. 

5. Obsolete English words still in good use in America. 

6. English words, American by inflection and modification. 

7. Odd and ignorant popular phrases, proverbs, vulgarisms, and colloquial¬ 
isms, cant and slang. 

8. Individualisms. 

9. Doubtful and miscellaneous. 

Clapin, in 1902, 83 reduced these categories to four: 

1. Genuine English words, obsolete or provincial in England, and universally 
used in the United States. 

2. English words conveying, in the United States, a different meaning from 
that attached to them in England. 

3. Words introduced from other languages than the English:—French, Dutch, 
Spanish, German, Indian, etc. 

4. Americanisms proper, i. e., words coined in the country, either represent¬ 
ing some new idea or peculiar product. 

Thornton, in 1912, substituted the following: 

1. Forms of speech now obsolete or provincial in England, which survive in 
the United States, such as allow, bureau, fall, gotten, guess, likely, professor, 
shoat. 

2. Words and phrases of distinctly American origin, such as belittle, lengthy, 
lightning-rod, to darken one's doors, to bark up the wrong tree, to come out at 
the little end of the horn, blind tiger, cold snap, gay Quaker, gone ooon, long 
sauce, pay dirt, small potatoes, some pumpkins. 

3. Nouns which indicate quadrupeds, birds, trees, articles of food, etc., that 
are distinctively American, such as ground-hog, hang-bird, hominy, live-oak, 
locust, opossum, persimmon, pone, succotash, wampum, wigwam. 

4. Names of persons and classes of persons, and of places, such as Buckeye, 
Cracker, Greaser, Eoosier, Old Bullion, Old Hickory, the Little Giant, Dixie, 
Gotham, the Bay State, the Monumental City. 

5. Words which have assumed a new meaning, such as card, clever, fork, 
help, penny, plunder, raise, rock, sack, ticket, windfall. 

83 Sylva Clapin: A New Dictionary of Americanisms, Being a Glossary of 
Words Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States and the Dominion of 
Canada; New York, 1902. 


44 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


In addition, Thornton added a provisional class of “words and 
phrases of which I have found earlier examples in American than 
in English writers; . . . with the caveat that further research may 
reverse the claim”—a class offering specimens in alarmist, capitalize, 
eruptiveness, horse of another colour (sic!), the jig’s up, nameable, 
omnibus bill, propaganda and whitewash. 

Tucker, in 1921, 84 attempted to reduce all Americanisms to two 
grand divisions, as follows: 

1. Words and phrases that originated in America and express something 
that the British have always expressed differently if they have mentioned it 
at all. 

2. Words and phrases that would convey to a British ear a different meaning 
from that which they bear in this country. 

To which he added seven categories of locutions not to be regarded 
as Americanisms, despite their inclusion in various previous lists, 
as follows: 

1. Words and phrases stated by the previous compiler himself to be of 
foreign [i. e., chiefly of English] origin, like Farmer’s hand-me-downs. 

2. Names of things exclusively American, but known abroad under the 
same name, such as moccasin. 

3. Names of things invented in the United States, like drawing-room oar. 

4. Words used in this country in a sense hardly distinguishable from that 
they bear in England, like force for a gang of laborers. 

5. Nonce words, like Mark Twain’s cavalieress. 

6. Perfectly regular and self-explanatory compounds, like offioe-hold&r, 
planing-machine, ink-slinger and fly-time. 

7. Purely technical terms, such as those employed in baseball. 

No more than a glance at these discordant classifications is needed 
to show that they hamper the inquiry by limiting its scope—not so 
much, to be sure, as the extravagant limitations of White and Louns- 
bury, but still very seriously. They leave out of account some of the 
most salient characters of a living language. Only Bartlett and 
Farmer establish a separate category of Americanisms produced by 
umlaut, by shading of consonants and by other phonological changes, 
though even Thornton, of course, is obliged to take notice of such 
forms as bust and bile, and even Tucker lists buster. None of them, 
however, goes into the matter at any length, nor even into the matter 

84 Gilbert M. Tucker: American English: New York, 1921. 




INTRODUCTORY 


45 


of etymology. Bartlett’s etymologies are scanty and often inaccu¬ 
rate; Scheie de Vere’s are sometimes quite fanciful; Thornton, 
Tucker and the rest scarcely offer any at all. It must be obvious 
that many of the words and phrases excluded by Tucker’s index 
expurgatorius are quite genuine Americanisms. Why should he bar 
out such a word as moccasin on the ground that it is also used in 
England ? So is caucus, and yet he includes it. He is also far too 
hostile to such characteristic American compounds as office-holder, 
fly-time and parlor-car. 85 True enough, their materials are good 
English, and they involve no change in the meaning of their com¬ 
ponent parts, but it must be plain that they were put together in the 
United States and that an Englishman always sees a certain strange¬ 
ness in them. Pay-dirt, panel-house, passage-way, patrolman, night- 
rider, low-down, knowmothing, hoe-cake and hog-wallow are equally 
compounded of pure English metal, and yet he lists all of them. 
Again, he is too ready, it seems to me, to bar out archaisms, which 
constitute one of the most interesting and authentic of all the classes 
of Americanisms. It is idle to prove that Chaucer used to guess. 
The important thing is that the English abandoned it centuries ago, 
and that when they happen to use it today they are always conscious 
that it is an Americanism. Baggage is in Shakespeare, but it is not 
in the London Times. The Times, save when it wants to be Ameri¬ 
can, uses luggage, as do the fashionable shop-keepers along Eifth 
avenue. Here Mr. Tucker allows his historical principles to run 
away with his judgment. His book represents the labor of nearly 
forty years and is full of shrewd observations and persuasive con¬ 
tentions, but it is sometimes excessively dogmatic. 86 

The most scientific and laborious of all these collections of Ameri¬ 
canisms is Thornton’s. It presents an enormous mass of quotations, 
and they are all very carefully dated, and it corrects most of the more 


“He gives the term as drawing-room car, but obviously means parlor-car. 
The former is a Briticism long since dropped in America. 

86 1 detect a few rather astonishing errors. P.D.Q. is defined as an abbrevia¬ 
tion of “pretty deuced quick,” which it certainly is not. Passage (of a bill in 
Congress) is listed as an Americanism; it is actually very good English and 
is used in England every day. Standee is defined as “standing place”; it really 
means one who stands. Sundae (the soda-fountain mess) is misspelled Sunday; 
it was precisely the strange spelling that gave the term vogue. Mucker, a 
brilliant Briticism, unknown in America, save in college slang, is listed between 
movie and muckraker. 


46 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


obvious errors in the work of earlier inquirers. But its very depend¬ 
ence upon quotations limits it chiefly to the written language, and 
so the enormously richer materials of the spoken language are passed 
over, and particularly the materials evolved during the past twenty 
years. One searches the two fat volumes in vain for such highly 
characteristic forms as near-accident and buttinski, the use of sure 
as an adverb, and the employment of well as a sort of general equiva¬ 
lent of the German also. These grammatical and syntactical tend¬ 
encies are beyond the scope of Thornton’s investigation, 87 but it is 
plain that they must be prime concerns of any future student who 
essays to get at the inner spirit of the language. Its difference from 
standard English is not merely a difference in vocabulary, to be 
disposed of in an alphabetical list; it is, above all, a difference in 
pronunciation, in intonation, in conjugation and declension, in meta¬ 
phor and idiom, in the whole fashion of using words. A page from 
one of Ring W. Lardner’s baseball stories contains few words that 
are not in the English vocabulary, and yet the thoroughly American 
color of it cannot escape anyone who actually listens to the tongue 
spoken around him. Some of the elements which enter into that 
color will be considered in the following pages. The American 
vocabulary, of course, must be given first attention, for in it the 
earliest American divergences are embalmed and it tends to grow 
richer and freer year after year, but attention will also be paid to 
materials and ways of speech that are less obvious, and in particular 
to certain tendencies of the grammar of spoken American, hitherto 
not investigated. 

87 His two volumes, however, do not exhaust the materials gathered by him. 
He collected enough matter to make three volumes. But his age dissuaded him 
from attempting to prepare it for the press, and so he deposited it at Harvard 
University, for the use of some future philologist. In 1917 he appealed to 
various rich men for funds to complete and publish his work, but “to their 
lasting infamy, they were uniformly too unappreciative ... to guarantee the 
success of this record of American self-expression.” See his letter in Dialed 
Notes, vol. v. p. 43 (1919). 



n. 


THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN 

1 . 

The First Differentiation 

William Gifford, the first editor of the Quarterly Review, is au¬ 
thority for the tale that a plan was set on foot during the Revolu¬ 
tion for the abandonment of English as the national language of 
America, and the substitution of Hebrew in its place. An American 
chronicler, Charles Astor Bristed, makes the proposed tongue Greek, 
and reports that the change was rejected on the ground that “it 
would be more convenient for us to keep the language as it is, and 
make the English speak Greek.” 1 The story, though it has the 
support of the editors of the Cambridge History of American Litera¬ 
ture, 2 has an apocryphal smack; one suspects that the savagely anti- 
American Gifford invented it. But, true or false, it well indicates the 
temper of those times. The passion for complete political independ¬ 
ence of England bred a general hostility to all English authority, 
whatever its character, and that hostility, in the direction of present 
concern to us, culminated in the revolutionary attitude of Noah 
Webster’s “Dissertations on the English Language,” printed in 1789. 
Webster harbored no fantastic notion of abandoning English alto¬ 
gether, but he was eager to set up American as a distinct and inde¬ 
pendent dialect. “Let us,” he said, “seize the present moment, and 
establish a national language as well as a national government. . . . 

1 Bristed was a grandson of John Jacob Astor and was educated at Cambridge. 
He contributed an extremely sagacious essay on The English Language in 
America to a volume of Cambridge Essays published by a group of young men 
of the university; London, 1855. For Gifford see the Quarterly, Jan., 1814, 
p. 528. 

a Vol. i, p. vi. 


47 



48 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


As an independent nation our honor requires us to have a system of 
our own, in language as well as government.” 

Long before this the challenge had been flung. Scarcely two years 
after the Declaration of Independence Franklin was instructed by 
Congress, on his appointment as minister to France, to employ “the 
language of the United States,” not simply English, in all his 
“replies or answers” to the communications of the ministry of Louis 
XVI. And eight years before the Declaration Franklin himself had 
invented a new American alphabet and drawn up a characteristically 
American scheme of spelling reform, and had offered plenty of proof 
in it, perhaps unconsciously, that the standards of spelling and pro¬ 
nunciation in the New World had already diverged noticeably from 
those accepted on the other side of the ocean. 3 In acknowledging 
the dedication of Webster’s “Dissertations” Franklin endorsed both 
his revolt against English domination and his forecast of widening 
differences in future, though protesting at the same time against 
certain Americanisms that have since come into good usage, and even 
migrated to England. Nor was this all. “A Scotchman of the name 
of Thornton,” having settled in the new republic and embraced its 
Kultur with horrible fervor, proposed a new alphabet even more 
radical than Franklin’s and, according to Gifford, was doubly hon¬ 
ored by the American Philosophical Society for his project, first by 
being given its gold medal and secondly by having his paper printed 
in its Transactions. This new alphabet included e's turned upside 
down and V s with their dots underneath. “Di Amorikan languids,” 
he argued, “uil dos bi az distint az do gavarnmant, fri from aul foliz 
or anfilosofikal fason.” 4 

Franklin’s protest to Webster was marked by his habitual mildness, 
but in other quarters dissent was voiced with far less urbanity. The 
growing independence of the colonial dialect, not only in its spoken 
form, but also in its most dignified written form, had begun, indeed, 
to attract the attention of purists in both England and America, and 
they sought to dispose of it in its infancy by force majeure. One of 

* Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling; Philadelphia, 
1768. 

* Quarterly Review, Jan., 1814, p. 529. The date of Thornton’s project I have 
been unable to establish. Franklin wrote to Webster on Dec. 26, 1789. See 
Franklin’s Works, ed. by A. H. Smythe; New York, 1905, vol. i, p. 40. 


THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN 


49 


the first and most vigorous of the attacks upon it at home was deliv¬ 
ered by John Witherspoon, a Scotch clergyman who came out in 1769 
to be president of Princeton in partibus infidelium. This Wither¬ 
spoon brought a Scotch hatred of the English with him, and at once 
became a leader of the party of independence; he signed the Declara¬ 
tion to the tune of much rhetoric, and was the only clergyman to sit 
in the Continental Congress. But in matters of learning he was 
orthodox to the point of immovability, and the strange locutions that 
he encountered on all sides aroused his pedagogic ire. “I have heard 
in this country,” he wrote in 1781, “in the senate, at the bar, and 
from the pulpit, and see daily in dissertations from the press, errors 
in gra mm ar, improprieties and vulgarisms which hardly any person 
of the same class in point of rank and literature would have fallen 
into in Great Britain.” 5 It was Witherspoon who coined the word 
Americanism—and at once the English guardians of the sacred ves¬ 
sels began employing it as a general synonym for vulgarism and bar¬ 
barism. Another learned immigrant, the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, 
soon joined him. This Boucher was a friend of Washington, but was 
driven back to England by his Loyalist sentiments. He took revenge 
by printing various charges against the Americans, among them that 
of “making all the haste they can to rid themselves of the [English] 
language.” He was vigorously supported by many Englishmen, in¬ 
cluding Samuel Johnson, whose detestation of all things American is 
familiar to every reader of Boswell. Johnson’s recognition of and 
aversion to Americanisms, in fact, long antedated the Revolution. 
When, in 1756, one Lewis Evans published a volume of “Geograph¬ 
ical, Historical, Philosophical, and Mechanical Essays,” with a map, 
the sage wrote of it: “The map is engraved with sufficient beauty, 
and the treatise written with such elegance as the subject admits, 
though not without some mixture of the American dialect; a trace of 
corruption to which every language widely diffused must always be 
exposed.” 

After the adoption of the Constitution nearly all the British re¬ 
views began to maintain an eager watchfulness for these abhorrent 

• The Druid, No. 5; reprinted in Witherspoon’s Collected Works, edited by 
Ashbel Green, vol. iv; New York, 1800-1. 




50 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


inventions, and to denounce them, when found, with vast acerbity. 
The Monthly Review opened the new offensive in July, 1797, with 
an attack upon the American spelling in Webster’s “Dissertations,” 
and the European Magazine and London Review joined it a month 
later with a violent diatribe against Jefferson’s Americanisms in his 
“Notes on Virginia.” “For shame, Mr. Jefferson!” it roared. 
“Why, after trampling upon the honour of our country, and repre¬ 
senting it as little better than a land of barbarism—why, we say, 
perpetually trample also upon the very grammar of our language, 
and make that appear as Gothic as, from your description, our man¬ 
ners are rude?—Freely, good sir, will we forgive all your attacks, 
impotent as they are illiberal, upon our national character; but for 
the future spare—O spare, we beseech you, our mother-tongue!” 
The Edinburgh joined the charge in October, 1804, with a patroniz¬ 
ing article upon John Quincy Adams’ “Letters on Silesia.” “The 
style of Mr. Adams,” it said, “is in general very tolerable English; 
which, for an American composition, is no moderate praise.” The 
usual American book of the time, it went on, was full of “affecta¬ 
tions and corruptions of phrase,” and they were even to be found 
in “the enlightened state papers of the two great Presidents.” The 
Edinburgh predicted that a “spurious dialect” would prevail, “even 
at the Court and in the Senate of the United States,” and that the 
Americans would thus “lose the only badge that is still worn of our 
consanguinity.” The appearance of the five volumes of Chief Justice 
Marshall’s “Life of George Washington,” from 1804 to 1807, brought 
forth corrective articles from the British Critic, the Critical Review, 
the Annual, the Monthly, and the Eclectic. The Edinburgh, in 1808, 
declared that the Americans made “it a point of conscience to have 
no aristocratical distinctions—even in their vocabulary.” They 
thought, it went on, “one word as good as another, provided its mean¬ 
ing be as clear." The Monthly Mirror, in March of the same year, 
denounced “the conniptions and barbarities which are hourly obtain¬ 
ing in the speech of our trans-atlantic colonies (sic),” and reprinted 
with approbation a parody by some anonymous Englishman of the 
American style of the day. Here is an extract from it, with the 
words that the author regarded as Americanisms in italics: 



THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN 


51 


In America authors are to be found who make use of new or obsolete words 
which no good writer in this country would employ; and were it not for my 
destitution of leisure, which obliges me to hasten the occlusion of these pages, 
as I progress I should bottom my assertation on instances from authors of the 
first grade; but were I to render my sketch lengthy I should illy answer the 
purpose which I have in view. 


The British Critic, in April, 1808, admitted somewhat despair¬ 
ingly that the damage was already done—that “the common speech 
of the United States has departed very considerably from the stand¬ 
ard adopted in England.” The others, however, sought to stay the 
flood by invective against Marshall and, later, against his rival 
biographer, the Rev. Aaron Bancroft. The Annual, in 1808, pro¬ 
nounced its high curse and anathema upon “that torrent of barbarous 
phraseology” which was pouring across the Atlantic, and which 
threatened “to destroy the purity of the English language.” 6 In 
Bancroft’s “Life of George Washington” (1808), according to the 
British Critic, there were gross Americanisms, inordinately offensive 
to Englishmen, “at almost every page.” 

The Rev. Jeremy Belknap, long anticipating Elwyn, White and 
Lounsbury, tried to obtain a respite from this abuse by pointing out 
the obvious fact that many of the Americanisms under fire were 
merely survivors of an English that had become archaic in England, 
but this effort counted for little, for on the one hand the British 
purist 3 enjoyed the chase too much to give it up, and on the other 
hand there began to dawn in America a new spirit of nationality, at 
first very faint, which viewed the differences objected to, not with 
shame, but with a fierce sort of pride. In the first volume of the 
North American Review William Ellery Channing spoke out boldly 
for “the American language and literature,” 7 and a year later 
Pickering published his defiant dictionary of “words and phrases 

* Vide, in addition to the citations in the text, the British Critic, Nov., 1793; 
Feb., 1810; the Critical, July, 1807; Sept., 1809; the Monthly, May, 1808; the 
Eclectic, Aug., 1813. For a laborious investigation of the whole question see 
British Criticisms of American Writings, 1783-1815, by William B. Cairns; 
Madison, Wis., 1918, pp. 20 et seq. Cairns says that the Edinburgh, the Anti- 
Jacobin, the Quarterly, and the European Magazine and London Review were 
especially virulent. He says that the Monthly, despite my quotations, was 
always “kindly toward America” and that the Eclectic was, “on the whole, 
fair.” The Literary Magazine and British Revieio he describes as enthusias¬ 
tically pro-American, but it lived only a short time. 

1 1815, pp. 307-14; reprinted in his Remarks on National Literature; Boston, 
1823. 



52 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


which have been supposed to he peculiar to the United States.” 8 
This thin collection of 500 specimens sets off a dispute which yet 
rages on both sides of the Atlantic. Pickering, however, was undis¬ 
mayed. He had begun to notice the growing difference between the 
English and American vocabulary and pronunciation, he said, while 
living in London from 1799 to 1801, and he had made his collec¬ 
tions with the utmost care, and after taking counsel with various 
prudent authorities, both English and American. Already in the 
first year of the century, he continued, the English had accused the 
people of the new republic of a deliberate “design to effect an entire 
change in the language,” and while no such design was actually 
harbored, the facts were the facts, and he cited the current news¬ 
papers, the speeches from pulpit and rostrum, and Webster himself 
in support of them. This debate over Pickering’s list, as I say, still 
continues. Lounsbury, entrenched behind his grotesque categories, 
once charged that four-fifths of the words in it had “no business to 
be there,” and Gilbert M. Tucker 9 has argued that “not more than 
about fifty” of them were “really of American origin and at any 
time in general respectable use.” But a careful study of the 
list, in comparison with the early quotations collected by Thornton, 
seems to indicate that both of these judgments, and many 
others no less, have done injustice to Pickering. He made the usual 
errors of the pioneer, but his sound contributions to the subject were 
anything but inconsiderable, and it is impossible to forget his dili¬ 
gence and his constant shrewdness. He established firmly the native 
origin of a number of words now in universal use in America— e. g., 
backwoodsman, breadstuffs, caucus, clapboard, sleigh and squatter — 
and of such familiar derivatives as gubernatorial and dutiable, and he 
worked out the genesis of not a few loan-words, including prairie, 
scow, rapids, hominy and barbecue. It was not until 1848, when the 
first edition of Bartlett appeared, that his work was supplanted. 

* Pickering was a son of Col. Timothy Pickering, quartermaster-general of the 
Continental Army, and later Postmaster-General, Secretary of War, Secretary 
of State, Senator and Chief Justice of Massachusetts. The younger Pickering 
was born in 1777 and died in 1846. He was a famous linguist in his day and 
wrote a Greek lexicon and various works on the Indian languages. He was at 
one time in the diplomatic service, and was president of the American Academy 
of Sciences and first president of the American Oriental Society. There is a 
biography of him by his daughter, Mary Orne Pickering; Boston, 1887. 

•American English, p. 53. 



THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN 


53 


2 . 

Sources of Early Americanisms 

The first genuine Americanisms were undoubtedly words borrowed 
bodily from the Indian dialects—words, in the main, indicating 
natural objects that had no counterparts in England. We find 
opossum, for example, in the form of opasum, in Captain John 
Smith’s “Map of Virginia” (1612), and, in the form of apossoun, 
in a Virginia document two years older. Moose is almost as old. 
The word is borrowed from the Algonquin musa, and must have be¬ 
come familiar to the Pilgrim Fathers soon after their landing in 
1620, for the woods of Massachusetts then swarmed with the huge 
animals and there was no English name to designate them. Again, 
there are skunk (from the Abenaki Indian seganku ), hickory, squash, 
caribou, pecan, scuppemong, paw-paw, raccoon, chinkapin, porgy, 
chipmunk, terrapin, menhaden, catalpa, persimmon and cougar. 10 
Of these, hickory and terrapin are to be found in Robert Beverley’s 
“History and Present State of Virginia” (1705), and squash, 
chinkapin and persimmon are in documents of the preceding century. 
Many of these words, of course, were shortened or otherwise modi¬ 
fied on being taken into colonial English. Thus, chinkapin was origi¬ 
nally checkinqumin, and squash appears in early documents as 
isquontersquash, and squantersquash. But William Penn, in a letter 
dated August 16, 1683, used the latter in its present form. Its varia¬ 
tions show a familiar effort to bring a new and strange word into 
harmony with the language—an effort arising from what philologists 
call the law of Hobson-Jobson. This name was given to it by Col. 
Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, compilers of a standard dictionary 
of Anglo-Indian terms. They found that the British soldiers in 
India, hearing strange words from the lips of the natives, often con¬ 
verted them into English words of similar sound, though of widely 
different meaning. Thus the words Hassan and Hosein, frequently 
used by the Mohammedans of the country in their devotions, were 

10 Cf. Algonquin Words in American English, by Alex. F. Chamberlain, Journal 
of American Folk-Lore, vol. xv, p. 240. Chamberlain lists 132 words, but some 
are localisms and others are obsolete. 


54 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


turned into Hob son-Job son. The same process is constantly in 
operation elsewhere. By it the French route de roi has become 
Rotten Row in English, ecrevisse has become crayfish, and the Eng¬ 
lish bowsprit has become beau pre (= beautiful meadow ) in French. 
No doubt squash originated in the same way. That woodchuck did so 
is practically certain. Its origin is to he sought, not in wood and 
chuck, but in the Cree word otchock, used by the Indians to designate 
the animal. 

In addition to the names of natural objects, the early colonists, 
of course, took over a great many Indian place-names, and a number 
of words to designate Indian relations and artificial objects in Indian 
use. To the last division belong hcnnmy, pone, toboggan, canoe, 
pemmican, mackinaw, tapioca, moccasin, paw-paw, papoose, sachem, 
sagamore, tomahawk, wigwam, succotash and squaw, all of which 
were in common circulation by the beginning of the eighteenth cen¬ 
tury. Finally, new words were made during the period by translat¬ 
ing Indian terms, for example, war-path, war-paint, pale-face, big- 
chief, medicineanan, pipe-of-peace and fire-water. The total number 
of such borrowings, direct and indirect, was a good deal larger than 
now appears, for with the disappearance of the red man the use of 
loan-words from his dialects has decreased. In our own time such 
words as papoose, sachem, tepee, samp, wigman and wampum have 
begun to drop out of everyday use; 11 at an earlier period the lan¬ 
guage sloughed off ocelot, manitee, calumet, supawn and quahaug, 
or began to degrade them to the estate of provincialisms. 12 A curious 
phenomenon is presented by the case of maize, which came into the 

11 A number of such Indian words are preserved in the nomenclature of 
Tammany Hall and in that of the Improved Order of Red Men, an organization 
with more than 500,000 members. The Red Men, borrowing from the Indians, 
thus name the months, in order: Cold Moon, Snow, Worm, Plant, Floioer, Hot, 
Buck, Sturgeon, Com, Travelers’, Beaver and Hunting. They call their officers 
incohonee, sachem, wampum-keeper, etc. But such terms, of course, are not in 
general use. 

U A long list of obsolete Americanisms, from Indian and other sources, is 
given by Clapin in his Dictionary. It is unfortunate that there is no dictionary 
of them on the plan of the New English Dictionary—that is, showing when they 
came in and when they went out. There is a constant loss in our own time. For 
example, the use of cars to designate railroad came in in the 40’s, was universal 
during the Civil War (as a glance at any newspaper of the time will show), and 
then was abandoned. Today it survives only in the signs occasionally seen at 
railroad crossings: “Look Out for the Cars,” e. g., on the Long Island Railroad, 
and in the verb-phrase, to change cars. Again, there is dude, born, as Thorn¬ 
ton shows, in 1883, and dead by 1895. 


THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN 


55 


colonial speech from some West Indian dialect, went over into ortho¬ 
dox English, and from English into French, German and other Con¬ 
tinental languages, and was then abandoned by the colonists. We 
shall see other examples of that process later on. 

Whether or not Yankee comes from an Indian dialect is still dis¬ 
puted. An early authority, John G. E. Heckwelder, argued that it 
was derived from an Indian mispronunciation of the word English • 
Certain later etymologists hold that it originated more probably in 
an Indian mishandling of the French word Anglais. Others derive 
it from the Scotch yankie, meaning a gigantic falsehood. Yet others 
derive it from the Dutch, and cite an alleged Dutch model for 
“Yankee Doodle,” beginning “Yanker didee doodle down.” Finally, 
Ernest Weekly, in his Etymological Dictionary, 13 makes the conjec¬ 
ture that it may be derived from the Dutch Jan (=John ), possibly 
by back-formation from Jan Kes {—John Cornelius). Of these 
theories that of Heckwelder is the most plausible. But here, as in 
other directions, the investigation of American etymology remains 
sadly incomplete. An elaborate dictionary of words derived from 
the Indian languages, compiled by the late W. R. Gerard, is in the 
possession of the Smithsonian Institution, but on account of a short¬ 
age of funds it remains in manuscript. 14 

From the very earliest days of English colonization the language 
of the colonists also received accretions from the languages of the 
other colonizing nations. The French word portage, for example, 
was already in common use before the end of the seventeenth cen¬ 
tury, and soon after came chowder, cache, caribou, voyageur, and 
various words that, like the last-named, have since become localisms 
or disappeared altogether. Before 1750 bureau , 15 gopher, batteau, 
bogus, and prairie were added, and caboose, a word of Dutch origin, 
seems to have come in through the French. Carry-all is also French 
in origin, despite its English quality. It comes, by the law of Hobson- 

1S An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English; New York, 1921, p. 1651. 
See also Irving’s “Knickerbocker,” ch. vii. 

14 1 have examined this manuscript. It consists of a vast mass of notes, many 
of them almost undecipherable. Editing it will be a colossal task. 

15 (a) A chest of drawers, (b) a government office. In both senses the word is 
rare in English, though its use by the French is familiar. In the United States 
its use in (b) has been extended, e. g., in employment-bureau. 


56 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


Jobson, from the French carriole. The contributions of the New 
Amsterdam Dutch during the half century of their conflicts with 
the English included cruller, cold-slaw, cookey, stoop, span (of 
horses), pit (as in peach-pit ), waffle, hook (a point of land), scow, 
boss, smearcase and Santa Claus .Scheie de Yere credits them 
with hay-barrack, a corruption of hooiberg. That they established 
the use of bush as a designation for back-country is very probable; 
the word has also got into South African English and has been bor¬ 
rowed by Australian English from American. In American it has 
produced a number of familiar derivatives, e. g., bush-whacker and 
bush-town. Barrere and Leland also credit the Dutch with dander, 
which is commonly assumed to be an American corruption of dan¬ 
druff. They say that it is from the Dutch word donder {—thunder). 
Op donderen, in Dutch, means to burst into a sudden rage. The chief 
Spanish contributions to American were to come after the War of 
1812, with the opening of the West, but creole, calaboose, palmetto, 
peewee, key (a small island), quadroon, octoroon, barbecue, pickar 
ninny and stampede had already entered the language in colonial 
days. Jerked beef came from the Spanish charqui by the law of 
Hobson-Jobson. The Germans who arrived in Pennsylvania in 1682 
also undoubtedly gave a few words to the language, though it is often 
difficult to distinguish their contributions from those of the Dutch. 
It seems very likely, however, that sauerkraut 17 and noodle are to 
be credited to them. Finally, the negro slaves brought in gumbo, 
goober, juba and voodoo (usually corrupted to hoodoo ), and probably 
helped to corrupt a number of other loan-words, for example banjo 
and breakdown. Banjo seems to be derived from bandore or ban- 
durria, modern French and Spanish forms of tambour, respectively. 
It may, however, be an actual negro word; there is a term of like 
meaning, bania, in Senegambian. Ware says that breakdown, desig¬ 
nating a riotous negro dance, is a corruption of the French rigadon, 
but offers no evidence. The word, used in the American sense, is not 
in the English dictionaries. Bartlett listed it as an Americanism, 

18 From Sinterklaas—Saint Nicholas. Santa Claus has also become familiar 
to the English, but the Oxford Dictionary still calls the name an Americanism. 

31 The spelling is variously sauerkraut (the correct German form), sourkraut 
and sourkrout. 



THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN 


57 


but Thornton rejected it, apparently because, in the sense of a oob 
lapse, it has come into colloquial use in England. Its etymology is 
not given in the American dictionaries. It may be a compound regu¬ 
larly formed of English materials, like its brother, hoedown. 


3. 

New Words of English Material 

But of far more importance than these borrowings was the great 
stock of new words that the colonists coined in English metal—words 
primarily demanded by the “new circumstances under which they 
were placed,” but also indicative, in more than one case, of a delight 
in the business for its own sake. The American, even in the early 
eighteenth century, already showed many of the characteristics that 
were to set him off from the Englishman later on—his bold and some¬ 
what grotesque imagination, his contempt for dignified authority, 
his lack of aesthetic sensitiveness, his extravagant humor. Among the 
first colonists there were a few men of education, culture and gentle 
birth, but they were soon swamped by hordes of the ignorant and 
illiterate, and the latter, cut off from the corrective influence of 
books, soon laid their hands upon the language. It is impossible to 
imagine the austere Puritan divines of Massachusetts inventing such 
verbs as to cowhide and to logroll, or such adjectives as no-account 
and stumped, or such adverbs as no-how and lickety-split, or such 
substantives as bull-frog, hog-wallow and hoe-cake; but under their 
eyes there arose a contumacious proletariat which was quite capable 
of the business, and very eager for it. In Boston, so early as 1628, 
there was a definite class of blackguard roisterers, chiefly made up 
of sailors and artisans; in Virginia, nearly a decade earlier, John 
Pory, secretary to Governor Yeardley, lamented that “in these five 
months of my continuance here there have come at one time or 
another eleven sails of ships into this river, but fraighted more with 
ignorance than with any other marchansize.” In particular, the 
generation bom in the New World was uncouth and iconoclastic; 18 

18 Cf. The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. i, pp. 14 and 22. 


58 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


the only world it knew was a rough world, and the virtues that en¬ 
vironment engendered were not those of niceness, but those of enter¬ 
prise and resourcefulness. 

Upon men of this sort fell the task of bringing the wilderness to 
the ax and the plow, and with it went the task of inventing a vocabu¬ 
lary for the special needs of the great adventure. Out of their loutish 
ingenuity came a great number of picturesque names for natural 
objects, chiefly boldly descriptive compounds: bull-frog, canvas-back, 
mud-hen, cat-bird, razor-back, garter-snake, ground-hog and so on. And 
out of an inventiveness somewhat more urbane came such coinages 
as live-oak, potato-bug, turkey-gobbler, sweet-potato, poke-weed, 
copper-head, eel-grass, reed-bird, egg-plant, blue-grass, peanut, 
pitch-pine, cling-stone (peach), moccasin-snake, June-bug, lightning- 
bug, and buttermut. Live-oak appears in a document of 1610; bull¬ 
frog was familiar to Beverley in 1705; so was James-town weed 
(later reduced to Jimson weed, as the English huHleberry or 
whortleberry was reduced to huckleberry). These early Americans 
were not botanists. They were often ignorant of the names of the 
plants that they encountered, even when those plants already had 
English names, and so they exercised their fancy upon new ones. 
So arose Johnny-jump-up for the Viola tricolor, and basswood for the 
common European linden or lime-tree (Tilia ), and locust for the 
Robinia pseudacacia and its allies. The Jimson weed itself was any¬ 
thing but a novelty, but the pioneers apparently did not recognize it 
as the Datura stramonium, and so we find Beverley reporting that 
“some Soldiers, eating it in a Salad, turn’d natural Fools upon it 
for several Days.” The grosser features of the landscape got a lavish 
renaming, partly to distinguish new forms and partly out of an ob¬ 
vious desire to attain a more literal descriptiveness. I have men¬ 
tioned key and hook, the one borrowed from the Spanish and the 
other from the Dutch. With them came branch, fork, bluff 
(noun), neck, barrens, bottoms, watershed, foot-hill, water-gap, 
under-brush, bottom-land, clearing, notch, divide, knob, riffle, rolling- 
country and rapids , 19 and the extension of pond from artificial pools 

“The American origin of this last word has been disputed, but the weight of 
evidence seems to show that it was borrowed from the rapides of the French 
Canadians. It is familiar in the United States and Canada, but seldom met with 
in England. 


THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN 


59 


to small natural lakes, and of creek from small arms of the sea to 
shallow feeders of rivers. Such common English topographical 
terms as downs, weald, wold, fen, bog, fell, chase, combe, dell, 
tarn, common, heath and moor disappeared from the colonial tongue, 
save as fossilized in a few localisms and proper names. 20 So did 
bracken. 

With the new landscape came an entirely new mode of life—new 
foods, new forms of habitation, new methods of agriculture, new 
kinds of hunting. A great swarm of neologisms thus arose, and, as in 
the previous case, they were chiefly compounds. Back-country, 
back-woods, back-woodsman, back-settlers, back-settlements: all these 
were in common use early in the eighteenth century. Back-log was 
used by Increase Mather in 1684. Log-house appears in the Mary¬ 
land Archives for 1669. 21 Hoe-cake, Johnny-cake, pan-fish, corn¬ 
dodger, roasting-ear, corrircrib, corn-cob and pop-corn were all fa¬ 
miliar before the Revolution. So were pine-knot, snow-plow, cold- 
snap, land-slide, ash-can, bob-sled, apple-butter, salt-lick, prickly- 
heat, shell-road and cane-brake. Shingle was a novelty in 1705, but 
one S. Symonds wrote to John Winthrop, of Ipswich, about a clap- 
boarded house in 1637. Frame-house seems to have come in with 
shingle. Trail, half-breed, Indian-summer, Indian-giver, and In- 
dian-file, were obviously suggested by the Red Men. 22 Statehouse 
was borrowed, perhaps, from the Dutch. Selectman is first heard 
of in 1685, displacing the English alderman. Mush had displaced 
porridge in general use by 1671, though it still survives as a Southern 
localism. Soon afterwards hay-stack took the place of the 
English hay-cock, and such common English terms as byre, mews, 
wier and wain began to disappear. ILired-man is to be found in the 
Plymouth town records of 1737, and hired-girl followed soon after. 
So early as 1758, as we find in the diary of Nathaniel Ames, the 
second-year students at Harvard were already called sophomores, 
though for a while the spelling was often made sophimores. Camp¬ 
meeting was later; it did not appear until 1799. But land-office 

» E. g., Chevy Chase, Boston Common, the Back Bay fens, and cranberry-bog. 

21 Log-cabin came in later. Thornton’s first quotation is dated 1818. The 
Log-Cabin campaign was in 1840. 

a Cf. Memorials of the Indian, by Alex. F. Chamberlain, Journal of American 
Folk-Lore, April-June, 1902, p. 107. 


60 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


was familiar before 1700, and side-walk, spelling-bee, bee-line, moss- 
back, crazy-quilt, mud-scow, stamping-ground and a hundred and 
one other such compounds were in daily use before the Revolution. 
After that great upheaval the new money of the confederation 
brought in a number of new words. In 1782 Gouverneur Morris 
proposed' to the Continental Congress that the coins of the republic 
be called, in ascending order, unit, penny-bill, dollar and crown. 
Later Morris invented the word cent, substituting it for the English 
penny. 23 In 1785 Jefferson proposed mill, cent, dime, dollar and 
eagle, and this nomenclature was adopted. 

Various nautical terms peculiar to America, or taken into Eng¬ 
lish from American sources, came in during the eighteenth century, 
among them, schooner, cat-boat and pungy, not to recall batteau and 
canoe. According to a recent historian of the American merchant 
marine, 24 the first schooner ever seen was launched at Gloucester, 
Mass., in 1713. The word, it appears, was originally spelled 
scooner. To scoon was a verb borrowed by the Hew Englanders from 
some Scotch dialect, and meant to skim or skip across the water 
like a flat stone. As the first schooner left the ways and glided out 
into Gloucester harbor, an enraptured spectator shouted: “Oh, see 
how she scoons!” “A scooner let her be!” replied Captain An¬ 
drew Robinson, her builder—and all boats of her peculiar and 
novel fore-and-aft rig took the name thereafter. The Dutch mariners 
borrowed the term and changed the spelling, and this change was 
soon accepted in America. 25 The Scotch root came from the Horse 
skunna, to hasten, and there are analogues in Icelandic, Anglo-Saxon 
and Old High German. The origin of cat-boat and pungy I have 
been unable to determine. Perhaps the latter is related in some 
way to pung, a one-horse sled or wagon. Pung was once widely used 
in the United States, but of late it has sunk to the estate of a Hew 
England provincialism. Longfellow used it, and in 1857 a writer 
in the Knickerbocker Magazine reported that pungs filled Broad¬ 
way, in Hew York, after a snow-storm. 

Most of these new words, of course, produced derivatives, for 

"Theodore Roosevelt: Gouverneur Morris; Boston, 1888, p. 104. 

"William Brown Meloney: The Heritage of Tyre; New York, 1916, p. 15. 

"The Germans have adopted the word, spelling it variously sohooner, sohoner 
and schuner. 


THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN 


61 


example, to shingle, to shucJc (i. e., corn), to trail and to caucus. 
Backwoods immediately begat backwoodsman and was itself turned 
into a common adjective. The colonists, indeed, showed a beautiful 
disregard for linguistic nicety. At an early date they shortened the 
English law-phrase, to convey by deed, to the simple verb, to deed. 
Pickering protested against this as a barbarism, and argued that no 
self-respecting law-writer would employ it, but all the same it was 
firmly entrenched in the common speech and it has remained there 
to this day. To table, for to lay on the table, came in at the same 
time, and so did various forms represented by bindery, for book¬ 
binders shop. To tomahawk appeared before 1650, and to scalp 
must have followed soon after. Within the next century and a half 
they were reinforced by many other such new verbs, and by such 
adjectives made of nouns as no-account and one-horse, and such 
nouns made of verbs as carry-all and goner, and such adverbs as 
no-how. In particular, the manufacture of new verbs went on at a 
rapid pace. In his letter to Webster in 1789 Franklin denounced 
to advocate, to progress, and to oppose —a vain enterprise, for all of 
them are now in perfectly good usage. To advocate, indeed, was used 
by Thomas Nashe in 1589, and by John Milton half a century later, 
but it seems to have been reinvented in America. In 1822 and 
again in 1838 Robert Southey, then poet laureate, led two belated 
attacks upon it, as a barbarous Americanism, but its obvious use¬ 
fulness preserved it, and it remains in good usage on both sides of 
the Atlantic today—one of the earliest of the English borrowings 
from America. In the end, indeed, even so ardent a purist as 
Richard Grant White adopted it, as he did to placate . 26 

Webster, though he agreed with Franklin in opposing to advocate, 
gave his imprimatur to to appreciate (i. e., to rise in value), and 
is credited by Sir Charles Lyell 27 with having himself invented to 
demoralize. He also approved to obligate. To antagonize seems to 
have been given currency by John Quincy Adams, to immigrate by 
John Marshall, to eventuate by Gouverneur Morris, and to derange 
by George Washington. Jefferson, always hospitable to new words, 
used to belittle in his “Rotes on Virginia,” and Thornton thinks 

* Vide his preface to Every-Day English, pp. xxi and xv, respectively. 

” Vide Lyell’s Travels in North America; London, 1845. 


62 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


that he coined it. Many new verbs were made by the simple process 
of prefixing the preposition to common nouns, e. g., to cleric, to 
dicker, to dump, to negative, to blow (i. e., to bluster or boast), to 
cord ( i. e., wood), to stump, to room and to skin. Others were pro¬ 
duced by phonological changes in verbs of the orthodox vocabulary, 
e. g., to cavort from to curvet, and to snoop from to snook. Others 
arose as metaphors, e. g., to whitewash (figuratively) and to squat 
(on unoccupied land). Others were made by hitching suffixes to 
nouns, or by groping for roots, e. g., to deputize, to locate, to legis¬ 
late, to infract, to compromit and to happify. Yet others seem to 
have been produced by onomatopoeia, e. g., to fizzle, or to have 
arisen by some other such spontaneous process, so far unintelligible, 
e. g., to tote. With them came an endless series of verb-phrases, 
e. g., to draw a bead, to face the music, to darken one’s doors, to 
take to the woods, to fly off the handle, to go on the war-path and 
to saw wood —all obvious products of pioneer life. Many coinages 
of the pre-E evolutionary era later disappeared. Jefferson used to 
ambition, but it dropped out nevertheless. So did conflagrative, 
though a president of Yale gave it his imprimatur. So did to 
compromit (i. e., to compromise), to homologize and to happify . 28 
Fierce battles raged ’round some of these words, and they were all 
violently derided in England. Even so useful a verb as to locate, 
row in quite respectable usage, was denounced in the third volume 
of the North American Review, and other purists of the times tried 
to put down to legislate. 

The young and tender adjectives had quite as hard a row to hoe, 
particularly lengthy. The British Critic attacked it in November, 
1793, and it also had enemies at home, but John Adams had used it 
in his diary in 1759 and the authority of Jefferson and Hamilton 
was behind it, and so it survived. Years later James Kussell 
Lowell spoke of it as “the excellent adjective,” 29 and boasted that 
American had given it to English. Dutiable also met with opposi¬ 
tion, and moreover it had a rival, customable; but Marshall wrote 
it into his historic decisions, and thus it took root. The same 

88 Thornton’s last example of the use of to compromit is dated 1842; of to 
happify, 1857, and of to ambition, 1861. To happify seems to have died in 1811. 

“Pref. to the Biglow Papers, 2nd series, 1866. 


THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN 


63 


anonymous watchman of the North American Review who protested 
against to locate pronounced his anathema upon “such barbarous 
terms as 'presidential and congressionalN but the plain need for them 
kept them in the language. Gubernatorial had come in long before 
this, and is to be found in the New Jersey Archives of 1734. In¬ 
fluential was denounced by the Rev. Jonathan Boucher and by 
George Canning, who argued that influent was better, but it was 
ardently defended by William Pinkney, of Maryland, and gradually 
made its way. Handy, kinky, law-abiding, chunky, solid (in the 
sense of well-to-do), evincive, complected, judgmatical, underpinned, 
blooded and cute were also already secure in revolutionary days. 
So with many nouns. Jefferson used breadstuffs in his Report of 
the Secretary of State on Commercial Restrictions, December 16, 
1793. Balance, in the sense of remainder, got into the debates of 
the First Congress. Mileage was used by Franklin in 1754, and 
is now sound English. Elevator, in the sense of a storage house for 
grain, was used by Jefferson and by others before him. Draw, for 
drawbridge, comes down from revolutionary days. So does slip, 
in the sense of a berth for vessels. So does addition, in the sense 
of a suburb. So, finally, does darkey. 

The history of many of these Americanisms shows how vain is 
the effort of grammarians to combat the normal processes of lan¬ 
guage development. I have mentioned the early opposition to 
dutiable, influential, presidential, lengthy, to locate, to oppose, to 
advocate, to legislate, and to progress. Bogus, reliable and standpoint 
were attacked with the same academic ferocity. All of them are to 
be found in Bryant’s Index Expurgatorius 30 (circa 1870), and 
reliable was denounced by Bishop Coxe as “that abominable bar¬ 
barism” so late as 1886. 31 Edward S. Gould, another uncompromis¬ 
ing purist, said of standpoint that it was “the bright particular star 
. . . of solemn philological blundering” and “the very counterpart 
of Dogberry’s non-com.” 32 Gould also protested against to jeopar- 

80 Reprinted in Helpful Hints in Writing and Reading, comp, by Grenville 
Kleiser; New York, 1911, pp. 15-17. 

81 A. Cleveland Coxe: Americanisms in England, Forum , Oct., 1886. 

83 Edward S. Gould: Good English, or, Popular Errors in Language; New York, 
1867, pp. 25-27. So recently as 1918 a reviewer denounced me for using it in a 
book and hinted that I had borrowed it from the German standpunkt. 


64 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


dize, leniency and to demean, though the last named was very old 
in English in the different sense of to conduct one’s self, and Richard 
Grant White joined him in an onslaught upon to donate. But all of 
these words are in good use in the United States today, and some 
of them have gone over into English. 33 


4. 

Changed Meanings 

A number of the foregoing contributions to the American vocabu¬ 
lary, of course, were simply common English words with changed 
meanings. To squat, in the sense of to crouch, had been sound 
English for centuries; what the colonists did was to attach a 
figurative meaning to it, and then bring that figurative meaning into 
wider usage than the literal meaning. In a somewhat similar man¬ 
ner they changed the significance of pond, as I have pointed out. 
So, too, with creek. In English it designated (and still designates) 
a small inlet or arm of a large river or of the sea; in American, so 
early as 1674, it designated any small stream. Many other such 
changed meanings crept into American in the early days. A 
typical one was the use of lot to designate a parcel of land. Thorn¬ 
ton says, perhaps inaccurately, that it originated in the fact that the 
land in New England was distributed by lot. Whatever the truth, 
lot, to this day, is in almost universal use in the United States, 
though rare in England. Our conveyancers, in describing real prop¬ 
erty, always speak of “all that lot or parcel of land.” 34 Other exam¬ 
ples of the application of old words to new purposes are afforded by 
freshet, barn and team. A freshet, in eighteenth century English, 
meant any stream of fresh water; the colonists made it signify .an 
inundation. A bam was a house or shed for storing crops; in the 
colonies the word came to mean a place for keeping cattle also. A 
team, in English, was a pair of draft horses; in the colonies it came 

50 Cf. Chapter V, Section 1. 

84 Lott appears in the Connecticut Code of 1650. Vide the edition of Andrus; 
Hartford, 1822. On page 35 is “their landes, lotts and accommodations.” On 
page 46 is “meadow and home lotts.” 



THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN 


65 


to mean both horses and vehicle, though the former meaning, rein¬ 
forced, survived in the tautological phrase, double team. 

The process is even more clearly shown in the history of such 
words as com and shoe. Com, in orthodox English, means grain for 
human consumption, and especially wheat, e. g., the Com Laws. 
The earliest settlers, following this usage, gave the name of Indian 
com to what the Spaniards, following the Indians themselves, had 
called maiz. The term appears in Bradford’s “History of Plimouth 
Plantation” (1647) and in Mourt’s “Delation” (1622). But grad¬ 
ually the adjective fell off, and by the middle of the eighteenth cen¬ 
tury maize was called simply com and grains in general were called 
breadstuffs. Thomas Hutchinson, discoursing to George III in 1774, 
used com in this restricted sense, speaking of “rye and com mixed.” 
“What corn ?” asked George. “Indian corn,” explained Hutchinson, 
“or, as it is called in authors, maize.” 35 So with shoe. In English 
it meant (and still means) a topless article of footwear, but the 
colonists extended its meaning to varieties covering the ankle, thus 
displacing the English boot, which they reserved for foot coverings 
reaching at least to the knee. To designate the English shoe they 
began to use the word slipper. This distinction between English 
and American usage still prevails, despite the fashion which has 
lately sought to revive boot in the United States, and with it its 
derivatives, boot-shop and boot-maker. 

Store, shop, lumber, pie, dry-goods, cracker, rock and partridge 
among nouns and to haul, to jew, to notify and to heft 36 among verbs 
offer further examples of changed meanings. Down to the middle 
of the eighteenth century shop continued to designate a retail estab¬ 
lishment in America, as it does in England to this day. Store was 
applied only to a large establishment—one showing, in some meas¬ 
ure, the character of a warehouse. But in 1774 a Boston young 
man was advertising in the Massachusetts Spy for “a place as a 
clerk in a store” (three Americanisms in a row!). Soon afterward 
shop began to acquire its special American meaning of a factory, e. g., 
machine-shop. Meanwhile store completely displaced shop in the 

ts Vide Hutchinson’s Diary, vol. i, p. 171; London, 1883-6. 

“A correspondent informs me that this verb occurs in the “testification” pre¬ 
fixed to the Book of Mormon. 



66 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


English sense, and it remained for a late flowering of Anglomania, 
as in the case of boot and shoe, to restore, in a measure, the status 
quo ante. Lumber, in eighteenth century English, meant disused 
goods, and this is its common meaning in England today, as is 
shown by lumber-room. But the colonists early employed it to 
designate cut timber, and that use of it is now universal in America. 
Its familiar derivatives, e. g., lumber-yard, lumberman, lumberjack, 
greatly reinforce this usage. Dry-goods, in England, means, “non¬ 
liquid goods, as corn” (i, e., wheat) ; in the United States the term 
means “textile fabrics or wares.” 37 The difference had appeared 
before 1725. Rock, in English, always means a large mass; in 
America it may mean a small stone, as in rock-pile and to throw a 
rock. The Puritans were putting rocks into the foundations of their 
meeting-houses so early as 1712. 38 Cracker began to be used for 
biscuit before the Revolution. Tavern displaced inn at the same 
time. As for partridge, it is cited by a late authority 39 as a salient 
example of changed meaning, along with com and store. In England 
the term is applied only to the true partridge ( Perdix perdix ) and its 
nearly related varieties, but in the United States it is also often used 
to designate the ruffed grouse ( Bonasa umbellus), the common quail 
(Colinus virginianus) and various other tetraonoid birds. This 
confusion goes back to Colonial times. So with rabbit. Zoologically 
speaking, there are no native rabbits in the United States; they are 
all hares. But the early colonists, for some unknown reason, dropped 
the word hare out of their vocabulary, and it is rarely heard in 
American speech to this day. When it appears it is almost always 
applied to the so-called Belgian hare, which, curiously enough, is 
not a hare at all, but a true rabbit. Bay and bayberry have also 
acquired special American meanings. In England bay is used to 
designate the bay-tree ( Lauras nobilis ) ; in America it designates 
a shrub, the wax myrtle ( Myrica cerifera). Both the tree and the 
shrub have berries. Those of the latter are used to make the well- 
known bayberry candles. 

"The definitions are from the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English 
(1914) and the Standard Dictionary (1906) respectively. 

S. Sewall: Diary, April 14, 1712: “I lay’d a Rock in the Northeast corner 
of the Foundation of the Meeting-house.” 

39 The Americans, . . . art. Americanisms; New York, 1903-6. 


THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN 


67 


To haul, in English, means to move by force or violence; in the 
colonies it came to mean to transport in a vehicle, and this meaning 
survives in sound American. To jew, in English, means to cheat; 
the colonists made it mean to haggle, and devised to jew down to 
indicate an effort to work a reduction in price. To heft, in Eng¬ 
lish, means to lift up; the early Americans made it mean to weigh 
by lifting, and kept the idea of weighing in its derivatives, e. g., 
hefty. Finally, there is the vulgar American misuse of Miss or 
Mis' (pro. miz ) for Mrs. It was so widespread by 1790 that on 
November 17 of that year Webster solemnly denounced it in the 
American Mercury. 


5. 

Archaic English Words 


Most of the colonists who lived along the American seaboard in 
1750 were the descendants of immigrants who had come in fully a 
century before; after the first settlements there had been much 
less fresh immigration than many latter-day writers have assumed'. 
According to Prescott F. Hall, “the population of New England 
. . . at the date of the Revolutionary War . . . was produced out 
of an immigration of about 20,000 persons who arrived before 
16J/.0,” 40 and we have Franklin’s authority for the statement that 
the total population of the colonies in 1751, then about 1,000,000, 
had been produced from an original immigration of less than 
80,000. 41 Even at that early day, indeed, the colonists had begun 
to feel that they were distinctly separated, in culture and customs, 
from the mother-country 42 and there were signs of the rise of a 

40 Immigration, 2nd ed.; New York, 1913, p. 4. Sir J. It. Seeley says, in The 
Expansion of England (2nd ed.; London, 1895, p. 84) that the emigration from 
England to New England, after the meeting of the Long Parliament (1640), 
was so slight for a full century that it barely balanced “the counter-movement 
of colonists quitting the colony.” Richard Hildreth, in his History of the United 
States, vol. i, p. 267, says that the departures actually exceeded the arrivals. 
See also The Founding of New England, by James Truslow Adams; Boston, 1921, 
p. 221 ff. 

“Works, ed. by Sparks: vol. ii, p. 319. 

42 Of. Pehr Kalm: Travels into N. America, tr. by J. R. Forster, 3 vols.; 
London, 1770-71. 


68 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


new native aristocracy, entirely distinct from the older aristocracy 
of the royal governors’ courts. 43 The enormous difficulties of com¬ 
munication with England helped to foster this sense of separation. 
The round trip across the ocean occupied the better part of a year, 
and was hazardous and expensive; a colonist w T ho had made it was 
a marked man—as Hawthorne said, “the petit maitre of the 
colonies.” Nor was there any very extensive exchange of ideas, for 
though most of the books read in the colonies came from England, the 
great majority of the colonists, down to the middle of the century, 
seem to have read little save the Bible and biblical commentaries, 
and in the native literature of the time one seldom comes upon any 
reference to the English authors who were glorifying the period 
of the Restoration and the reign of Anne. “Ho allusion to Shake¬ 
speare,” says Bliss Perry, 44 “has been discovered in the colonial lit¬ 
erature of the seventeenth century, and scarcely an allusion to the 
Puritan poet Milton.” Benjamin Franklin’s brother, James, had a 
copy of Shakespeare at the New England Courant office in Boston, 
but Benjamin himself seems to have made little use of it, for there 
is not a single quotation from or mention of the bard in all his 
voluminous works. “The Harvard College Library in 1723,” says 
Perry,” had nothing of Addison, Steele, Bolingbroke, Dryden, Pope, 
and Swift, and had only recently obtained copies of Milton and 
Shakespeare. . . . Franklin reprinted ‘Pamela’ and his Library 
Company of Philadelphia had two copies of ‘Paradise Lost’ for cir¬ 
culation in 1741, but there had been no copy of that work in the 
great library of Cotton Mather.” Moreover, after 1760, the eyes of 
the colonists were upon France rather than upon England, and 
Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire and the Encyclopedists began to 
be familiar names to thousands who were scarcely aware of Addi¬ 
son and Steele, or even of the great Elizabethans. 45 

43 Sydney George Fisher: The True Story of the American Revolution; Phila. 
and London, 1902, p. 27. See also John T. Morse’s Life of Thomas Jefferson 
in the American Statesmen series (Boston and New York, 1898), p. 2. Morse 
points out that Washington, Jefferson and Madison belonged to this new aris¬ 
tocracy, not to the old one. 

"The American Spirit in Literature; New Haven, 1918, p. 61. 

"( 7 /. the Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. i, p. 119. Francis 
Jeffrey, writing on Franklin in the Edinburgh Review for July, 1806, hailed 
him as a prodigy who had arisen “in a society where there was no relish and 
no encouragement for literature.” 


THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN 


69 


The result of this isolation, on the one hand, was that proliferation 
of the colonial speech which I have briefly reviewed, and on the other 
hand, the preservation of many words and phrases that gradually 
became obsolete in England. The Pilgrims of 1620 brought over 
with them the English of James I and the Authorized Version, and 
their descendants of a century later, inheriting it, allowed its fun¬ 
damentals to be but little changed by the academic overhauling that 
the mother-tongue was put to during the early part of the eighteenth 
century. In part they were ignorant of this overhauling, and in 
part they were indifferent to it. Whenever the new usage differed 
from that of the Bible they were inclined to remain faithful to the 
Bible, not only because of its pious authority but also because of 
the superior pull of its imminent and constant presence. Thus when 
an artificial prudery in English ordered the abandonment of the 
Anglo-Saxon sick for the Old hforse ill(r ), the colonists refused to 
follow, for sick was in both the Old Testament and the New; 46 and 
that refusal remains in force to this day. 

A very large number of words and phrases, many of them now 
exclusively American, are similar survivals from the English of the 
seventeenth century, long since obsolete or merely provincial in Eng¬ 
land. Among nouns Thornton notes fox-fire, flap-jack, jeans, mo¬ 
lasses, beef (to designate the live animal), chinch, cordwood, homer 
spun, ice-cream, julep and swingle-tree; Halliwell 47 adds andiron, 
bay-window, cesspool, clodhopper, cross-purposes, greenhorn, loop¬ 
hole, ragamuffin and trash; and other authorities cite stock (for 
cattle), fall (for autumn), offal, din, underpinning and adze. Bub, 
used in addressing a boy, is very old English, but survives only in 
American. Flapjack goes back to “Piers Plowman,” but has been ob¬ 
solete in England for two centuries. Muss, in the sense of a row, 
is also obsolete over there, but it is to be found in “Antony and 
Cleopatra.” Char, as a noun, disappeared from standard English 
long ago, save in the compound, charwoman, but it survives in 

"Examples of its use in the American sense, considered vulgar and even 
indecent in England, are to be found in Gen. xlviii, 1; II Kings viii, 7; John 

xi, 1, and Acts ix, 37. . 

47 J. 0. Halliwell (Phillips) : A Dictionary of Archaisms and Provincialisms, 
Containing Words now Obsolete in England All of Which are Familiar and in 
Common Use in America, 2nd ed.; London, 1850. See also Gilbert M. Tucker’s 
American English; New York, 1921, p. 39 ff. 



70 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


America as chore. Am ong the verbs similarly preserved are to 
whittle, to wilt and to approbate. To guess, in the American sense 
of to suppose, is to be found in “Henry VI”: 

Not all together; better far, I guess, 

That we do make our entrance several ways. 

In “Measure for Measure” Escalus says “I guess not” to Angelo. 
The Hew English Dictionary offers examples much older—from 
Chaucer, TYycliffe and Gower. To interview is in Dekker. To loan, 
in the American sense of to lend, is in 34 and 35 Henry VIII, but 
it dropped out of use in England early in the eighteenth century, 
and all the leading dictionaries, both in English and American, now 
call it an Americanism. 48 To fellowship, once in good American 
use but now reduced to a provincialism, is in Chaucer. Even to 
hustle, it appears, is ancient. Among adjectives, homely was used in 
its American sense of plain-featured by both Shakespeare and Mil- 
ton. Other such survivors are burly, catty-cornered, likely, deft, 
copious, scant and ornate. Perhaps clever also belongs to this 
category, that is, in the American sense of amiable. 

Most of the English archaisms surviving in American seem to 
be derived from the dialects of Eastern England, from which region, 
in fact, most of the original English settlers came. The Rev. 
Edward Gepp, of Colchester, who has made comparative studies of 
the Essex dialect and the common speech of the United States, says 
that the latter shows a “striking absence of words and forms char¬ 
acteristic of Scotland, and of the north and west of England.” 49 
Since the early colonial period there has been an accession of northern 
forms, chiefly through the so-called Scotch-Irish influence, but the 
older archaisms are nearlv all southern or eastern. Hew England, 
in particular, was settled by immigrants from Eastern England, and 
another English observer, the Rev. H. T. Armfield, has found many 
Essex place-names there, among them, Hedingham, Toppesfield, 
Wethersfield, Braintree, Colchester, Haverhill and Billercia. 50 

“An interesting discussion of this verb appeared in the 'New York Sun, 
Nov. 27, 1914. 

“A Contribution to an Essex Dialect Dictionary, Supplement III; Col¬ 
chester, 1922. 

50 Trans. Essex Archceologicol Sooiety, vol. iv, N. S., 1893. 





THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN 


71 


Among the vulgar forms now common in the United States which still 
survive in the Essex dialect Mr. Gepp notes kilter, kiver, yarb, ary, 
nary, ellum, tonguey, pesky, snicker, bimeby, cowcumber, invite 
(for invitation ) and hoss, and the verbs to argify, to slick up and to 
scrimp. He finds that these Essex forms are very widespread in the 
United States, but he believes that the English of Virginia shows 
earlier borrowings than that of New England. “We note,” he says, 
“that as the scene shifts westward the old dialect appears less and 
less, but still it has traveled, and, though sparse in growth, has found 
its footing.” His Essex word-lists contain, in addition to the 
examples cited, many words that are now very good American, e. g., 
chump, given-name and heft. 

“Our ancestors,” said James Russell Lowell, “unhappily could 
bring over no English better than Shakespeare’s.” Shakespeare died 
in 1616; the Pilgrims landed four years later; Jamestown was 
founded in 1607. As we have seen, the colonists, saving a few 
superior leaders, were men of small sensitiveness to the refinements 
of life and speech: soldiers of fortune, amateur theologians, younger 
sons, neighborhood “advanced thinkers,” bankrupts, jobless workmen, 
decayed gentry, and other such fugitives from culture—in brief, 
Philistines of the sort who join tin-pot fraternal orders today, and 
march in parades, and whoop for the latest mountebanks in politics. 
There was thus a touch of rhetoric in Lowell’s saying that they spoke 
the English of Shakespeare; as well argue that the London grocers 
of 1885 spoke the English of Pater. But in a larger sense he said 
truly, for these men at least brought with them the vocabulary of 
Shakespeare’s time—or a part of it—even if the uses he made of it 
were beyond their comprehension, and they also brought with them 
that sense of ease in the language, that fine contempt for formality, 
that bold experimentalizing in words, which were so peculiarly Eliza¬ 
bethan. There were no grammarians in that day; there were no 
purists that anyone listened to; it was a case of saying your say in 
the easiest and most satisfying way. In remote parts of the United 
States there are still direct and almost pure-blooded descendants of 
those seventeenth century colonists. Go among them, and you will 
hear more words from the Elizabethan vocabulary, still alive and 
in common service, than anywhere else in the world, and more of the 





72 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


loose and brilliant syntax of that time, and more of its gipsy 
phrases. 51 


6 . 

Colonial Pronunciation 

The debate that long raged over the pronunciation of classical 
Latin exhibits the difficulty of determining with exactness the shades 
of sound in the speech of a people long departed from earth. 52 The 
American colonists, of course, are much nearer to us than the Ro¬ 
mans, and so we should have relatively little difficulty in determining 
just how they pronounced this or that word, but against the fact of 
their nearness stands the fact that our phonologists long neglected the 
study of their speech. Now that neglect has been remedied at last 
by Dr. George Philip Krapp, of Columbia University, who has 
lately completed an extensive work upon “the History of the Eng¬ 
lish Language in America.” I have had the privilege of reading 
the manuscript, but as this book goes to press it remains unpublished, 
and so I am not able to make use of its extremely valuable assem¬ 
bling of materials. Meanwhile, the general discussion of the subject 
in the technical journals is very scanty, and many errors mark it. 

One of these errors, chiefly prevalent in New England, is that 
the so-called Boston pronunciation, with its broad as, comes down 
unbrokenly from the day of the first settlements, and that it is in 
consequence superior in authority to the pronunciation of the rest 
of the country, with its flat a’s. A glance through Webster’s “Dis¬ 
sertations” is sufficient to show that the flat a was in use in New Eng¬ 
land in 1789, for the pronunciation of such words as wrath, bath and 
path, as given by him, makes them rhyme with hath. 53 Moreover, 
he gives aunt the same a-sound. From other sources come indica¬ 
tions that the a was likewise flattened in such words as plant, basket, 
branch, dance, blast, command and castle, and even in balm and calm. 

a Cf. J. H. Combs: Old, Early and Elizabethan English in the Southern Moun¬ 
tains, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. iv, pp. 283-97. 

“ There is an interesting discussion of this difficulty in the introduction to 
Dr. 0. Jespersen’s Modern English Grammar, 3rd ed.; Heidelberg, 1922. 

"P. 124. 


THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN 


73 


Changes in the sound of the letter have been going on in England ever 
since the Middle English period, 54 and according to Lounsbury, 55 
they have moved toward the disappearance of the Continental a, 
“the fundamental vowel-tone of the human voice.” Grandgent, an¬ 
other authority, 56 says that it became flattened “by the sixteenth 
century” and that “until 1780 or thereabouts the standard language 
had no broad a.” Even in such words as father, car and ask the flat 
a was universally used. Sheridan, in the dictionary he published in 
1780, 57 actually gave no ah -sound in his list of vowels. This habit 
of flatting the a had been brought over, of course, by the early colon¬ 
ists, and was as general in America, in the third quarter of the 
eighteenth century, as in England. Benjamin Franklin, when he 
wrote his “Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of 
Spelling,” in 1768, apparently had no suspicion that any other a 
was possible. But between 1780 and 1790, according to Grandgent, 
a sudden fashion for the broad a (not the ow-sound, as in fall, but 
the Continental sound as in far ) arose in England 58 and this fashion 
soon found servile imitation in Boston. But it was as much an 
affectation in those days as it is today, and Webster indicated the 
fact pretty plainly in his “Dissertations.” How, despite his opposi¬ 
tion, the broad a prevailed East of the Connecticut river, and how, 
in the end, he himself yielded to it, and even tried to force it upon 
the whole nation—this will be rehearsed in the next chapter. 

The colonists remained faithful much longer than the English 
to various other vowel-sounds that were facing change in the eight¬ 
eenth century, for example, the long e-sound in heard. Webster 
says that the custom of rhyming heard with bird instead of with 
feared came in at the beginning of the Revolution. “To most people 
in this country,” he adds, “the English pronunciation appears like 
affectation.” He also argues for rhyming deaf with leaf, and pro 

M Cf. Art. Changes in the Language Since Shakespeare’s Time, by W. Murison, 
in The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xiv, p. 485. 

“English Spelling and Spelling Reform; New York, 1909. 

“C. H. Grandgent: Fashion and the Broad A, Nation, Jan. 7, 1915; reprinted 
in Old and New; Cambridge (Mass.), 1920, pp. 25-30. 

"Thomas Sheridan: A Complete Dictionary of the English Language; Lon¬ 
don, 1780. 

“It first appeared in Robert Nares’ Elements of Orthoepy; London, 1784. 
In 1791 it received full approbation in John Walker’s Critical Pronouncing 
Dictionary. 


74 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


tests against inserting a ?/-sound before the u in such words as nature. 
Franklin’s authority stands behind git for get. This pronunciation, 
according to Menner, 59 was correct in seventeenth century England, 
and perhaps down to the middle of the next century. So was the 
use of the Continental f-sound in oblige, making it obleege. It is 
probable that the colonists clung to these disappearing usages much 
longer than the English. The latter, according to Webster, were 
unduly responsive to illogical fashions set by the exquisites of the 
court and by popular actors. He blames Garrick, in particular, for 
many extravagant innovations, most of them not followed in the 
colonies. But Garrick was surely not responsible for the use of a 
long f-sound in such words as motive, nor for the displacement of 
mercy by marcy. Webster denounced both of these pronunciations. 
The second he ascribed somewhat lamely to the fact that the letter r 
is called ar, and proposed to dispose of it by changing the ar to er. 

As for the consonants, the colonists seem to have resisted valiantly 
that tendency to slide over them which arose in England after the 
Restoration. Franklin, in 1768, still retained the sound of l in such 
words as would and should, a usage not met with in England after 
the year 1700. In the same way, according to Menner, the w in 
sword was sounded in America “for some time after Englishmen had 
abandoned it.” The sensitive ear of Henry James detected an un¬ 
pleasant r-sound in the speech of Americans, long ago got rid of by 
the English, so late as 1905; he even charged that it was inserted 
gratuitously in innocent words. 60 The obvious slurring of the con¬ 
sonants by Southerners is explained by a recent investigator 61 on the 
ground that it began in England during the reign of Charles II, 
and that most of the Southern colonists came to the Hew World at 
that time. The court of Charles, it is argued, was under French 
influence, due to the king’s long residence in France and his mar¬ 
riage to Henrietta Maria. Charles “objected to the inharmonious 
contractions willn’t (or wollnt ) and wasn’t and weren’t . . . and 

69 Robert J. Menner: The Pronunciation of English in America, Atlantic 
Monthly, March, 1915. 

60 The Question of Our Speech; Boston and New York, 1906, pp. 27-29. For a 
long and interesting discussion of the r-sound, see The Dog’s Letter, in Grand- 
gent’s Old and New, op. cit., p. 31. 

61 Elizabeth H. Hancock: Southern Speech, Neale’s Monthly, Nov., 1913. 


THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN 


75 


set the fashion of using the softly euphonious won’t and want, 
which are used in speaking to this day by the best class of Southern¬ 
ers.” A more direct French influence upon Southern pronunciation 
is also pointed out. “With full knowledge of his g’s and his r’s, 
. . . [the Southerner] sees fit to glide over them, . . . and he 
carries over the consonant ending one word to the vowel beginning 
the next, just as the Frenchman does.” The political importance of 
the South, in the years between the Mecklenburg Declaration and 
the adoption of the Constitution, tended to force its provincialisms 
upon the common language. Many of the acknowledged leaders 
of the nascent nation were Southerners, and their pronunciation, as 
well as their phrases, must have become familiar everywhere. 
Pickering gives us a hint, indeed, at the process whereby their usage 
influenced that of the rest of the people. 62 

The majority of Americans early dropped the 7i-sound in such 
words as when and where, 63 but so far as I can determine they 
never elided it at the beginning of words, save in the case of 
herb and humble. This elision is commonly spoken of as a cockney 
vulgarism, but it has extended to the orthodox English speech. In 
ostler the initial h is openly left off; in hotel and hospital it is 
sometimes not clearly sounded, even by careful Englishmen. Cer¬ 
tain English words in h, in which the h is now sounded, betray its 
former silence by the fact that not a but an is commonly put before 
them. It is still good English usage to write an hotel and an his¬ 
torical ,. 64 

83 Vide his remarks on balance in his Vocabulary. See also Marsh, p. 671. 

83 It is still supposed to be sounded in England, and its absence is often 
denounced as an American barbarism, but as a matter of fact few Englishmen 
actually sound it, save in the most formal discourse. Some time ago the English 
novelist, Archibald Marshall, published an article in a London newspaper argu¬ 
ing that it was a sheer physical impossibility to sound the h correctly. “You 
cannot pronounce wh,” he said, “if you try. You have to turn it into hw to 
make it any different from w.” Nevertheless, Mr. Marshall argued, with true 
English conservatism, that the effort should be made. “Most words of one 
syllable beginning with wh,” he said, “and many of two syllables have a corre¬ 
sponding word, but of quite different meaning, beginning with w alone. When- 
wen, whether-weather, while-idle, whither-wither, wheel-weal. If there is a 
distinction ready to hand it is of advantage to make use of it.” That is to say, 
to make use of hwen, hwether, h/wile, hwither and hweel. 

84 A correspondent sends me the following argument for an before hotel: 
“Personally, I cannot bring myself to write a hotel or a historical or 
indeed any combination wherein a is followed by an fo-word not accented on the 
first syllable. My sense of euphony (and, I believe, the genius of the English 


76 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


The great authority of Webster was sufficient to establish the 
American pronunciation of schedule. In England the sch is always 
given the soft sound, but Webster decided for the hard sound, as in 
scheme. The variance persists to this day. The name of the last 
letter of the alphabet, which is always zed in English, is often made 
zee in the United States. Thornton shows that this Americanism 
arose in the eighteenth century. 

language) requires something between the a and the ft-sound in all such cases. 
Witness the absence of English words showing such a combination. I believe 
that all English words beginning with a, in which a syllable beginning with h 
follows, are dissyllables. That is to say, the h-syllable is accented. Witness 
ahead , ahoy, ahem.” Cf. Text, Type and Style, by George B. Ives; Boston, 1921, 


III. 


THE PERIOD OF GROWTH 

1 . 

Character of the New Nation 

The English of the United States thus began to be recognizably 
differentiated from the English of England, both in vocabulary and 
in pronunciation, by the opening of the nineteenth century, but as 
yet its growth was hampered by two factors, the first being the lack 
of a national literature of any expanse and dignity and the second 
being an internal political disharmony which greatly conditioned 
and enfeebled the national consciousness. During the actual Revolu¬ 
tion common aims and common dangers forced the Americans to 
show a united front, but once they had achieved political independ¬ 
ence they developed conflicting interests, and out of those conflicting 
interests came suspicions and hatreds which came near wrecking the 
new confederation more than once. Politically, their worst weak¬ 
ness, perhaps, was an inability to detach themselves wholly from the 
struggle for domination then going on in Europe. The surviving 
Loyalists of the revolutionary era—estimated by some authorities to 
have constituted fully a third of the total population in 1776—were 
ardently in favor of England, and such patriots as Jefferson were 
as ardently in favor of France. This engrossment in the quarrels of 
foreign nations was what Washington warned against in his Fare¬ 
well Address. It was at the bottom of such bitter animosities as that 
between Jefferson and Hamilton. It inspired and perhaps excused 
the pessimism of such men as Bum Its net effect was to make it 
difficult for the people of the new nation to think of themselves, 
politically, as Americans. Their state of mind, vacillating, un¬ 
certain, alternately timorous and pugnacious, has been well described 

77 



78 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


by Henry Cabot Lodge in his essay on “Colonialism in America.” 1 
Soon after the Treaty of Paris was signed, someone referred to the 
late struggle, in Franklin’s hearing, as the War for Independence. 
“Say, rather, the War of the Revolution,” said Franklin. “The 
War for Independence is yet to be fought.” 

“That struggle,” adds Lossing, “occurred, and that independence 
was won, by the Americans in the War of 1812.” 2 In the interval 
the new republic had passed through a period of Sturm und Drang 
whose gigantic perils and passions we have begun to forget—a period 
in which disaster ever menaced, and the foes within were no less 
bold and pertinacious than the foes without. Jefferson, perhaps, 
carried his fear of “monocrats” to the point of monomania, but 
under it there was undoubtedly a body of sound fact. The poor 
debtor class (including probably a majority of the veterans of the 
Revolution) had been fired by the facile doctrines of the French 
Revolution to demands which threatened the country with bank¬ 
ruptcy and anarchy, and the class of property-owners, in reaction, 
went far to the other extreme. On all sides, indeed, there flourished 
a strong British party, and particularly in New England, where 
the so-called codfish aristocracy (by no means extinct today) ex¬ 
hibited an undisguised Anglomania, and looked forward confidently 
to a rapprochement with the mother country. 3 This Anglomania 
showed itself, not only in ceaseless political agitation, but also in 
an elaborate imitation of English manners. We have already seen 
how it even extended to the pronunciation of the language. 

In our own time, with the renewal of the centuriesrold struggle 
for power in Europe, there has been a revival of the old itch to 
take a hand, with results almost as menacing to the unity and 
security of the Republic as those visible when Washington voiced 
his warning. But in his day he seems to have been heard and 
heeded, and so colonialism gradually died out. The first sign of 
the dawn of a new national order came with the election of Thomas 

*In Studies in History; Boston, 1884. 

3 Benson J. Lossing: Our Country . . New York, 1879. 

* The thing went, indeed, far beyond mere hope. In 1812 a conspiracy was 
unearthed to separate New England from the republic and make it an English 
colony. The chief conspirator was one John Henry, who acted under the instruc¬ 
tions of Sir John Craig, Governor-General of Canada. 



THE PERIOD OF GROWTH 


79 


Jefferson to the Presidency in 1800. The issue in the campaign 
was a highly complex one, but under it lay a plain conflict between 
democratic independence and the European doctrine of dependence 
and authority; and with the Alien and Sedition Laws about his 
neck, so vividly reminiscent of the issues of the Revolution itself, 
Adams went down to defeat. Jefferson was violently anti-British 
and proFrench; he saw all the schemes of his political opponents, 
indeed, as English plots; he was the man who introduced the bugaboo 
into American politics. His first acts after his inauguration were 
to abolish all ceremonial at the court of the republic, and to abandon 
spoken discourses to Congress for written messages. That ceremonial, 
which grew up under Washington, was an imitation, he believed, of 
the formality of the abhorrent Court of St. James; as for the speeches 
to Congress, they were palpably modelled upon the speeches from the 
throne of the English kings. 4 Both reforms met with wide approval; 
the exactions of the English, particularly on the high seas, were be¬ 
ginning to break up the British party. But confidence in the solidar¬ 
ity and security of the new nation was still anything but universal. 
The surviving doubts, indeed, were strong enough to delay the 
ratification of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, providing 
for more direct elections of President and Vice-President, until 
the end of 1804, and even then three of the five Hew England states 
rejected it, 5 and have never ratified it, in fact, to this day. Democ¬ 
racy was still experimental, doubtful, full of gun-powder. In so 
far as it had actually come into being, it had come as a boon con¬ 
ferred from above. Jefferson, its protagonist, was the hero of the 
populace, but he was not of the populace himself, nor did he ever 
quite trust it. 

It was reserved for Andrew Jackson, a man genuinely of the 
people, to lead and visualize the rise of the lower orders. Jackson, 
in his way, was the archetype of the new American—ignorant, push¬ 
ful, impatient of restraint and precedent, an iconoclast, a Philis- 

4 It is curious to note that the revival of the spoken message in our own time 
was made by a President whose foreign policy was chiefly marked by its violent 
Anglomania, i. e., its colonialism. During his administration practically all of 
the ideas that entered into Jefferson’s politics, from suspicion of England to free 
speech, were abandoned. 

5 Maine was not separated from Massachusetts until 1820. 


80 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


tine, an Anglophobe in every fibre. He came from the extreme 
backwoods and his youth was passed, like that of Abraham Lincoln 
after him, amid surroundings but little removed from downright 
savagery. 6 Thousands of other young Americans of the same sort 
were growing up at the same time—youngsters filled with a vast 
impatience of all precedent and authority, revilers of all that had 
come down from an elder day, incorrigible libertarians. They 
swarmed across the mountains and down the great rivers, wrestling 
with the naked wilderness and setting up a casual, impromptu sort 
of civilization where the Indian still menaced. Schools were few and 
rudimentary; there was not the remotest approach to a cultivated 
society; any effort to mimic the amenities of the East, or of the 
mother country, in manner or even in speech, met with instant de¬ 
rision. It was in these surroundings and at this time that the 
thoroughgoing American of tradition was born; blatant, illogical, 
elate, “greeting the embarrassed gods” uproariously and matching 
“with Destiny for beers.” Jackson was unmistakably of that com¬ 
pany in his every instinct and idea, and it was his fate to give a 
new and unshakable confidence to its aspiration at the Battle of 
Hew Orleans. Thereafter all doubts began to die out; the new 
republic was turning out a success. And with success came a great 
increase in the national egoism. The hordes of pioneers rolled down 
the western valleys and on to the great plains. 7 American began 
to stand for something quite new in the world—in government, in 
law, in public and private morals, in customs and habits of mind, 
in the minutiae of social intercourse. And simultaneously the voice 
of America began to take on its characteristic twang, and the speech 
of America began to differentiate itself boldly and unmistakably from 
the speech of England. The average Philadelphian or Bostonian of 
1790 had not the slightest difficulty in making himself understood 
by a visiting Englishman. But the average Ohio boatman of 1810 
or plainsman of 1815 was already speaking a dialect that the Eng- 

* Vide Andrew Jackson . . ., by William Graham Sumner; Boston, 1883, pp. 
2 - 10 . 

7 Indiana and Illinois were erected into territories during Jefferson’s first 
term, and Michigan during his second term. Kentucky was admitted to the 
union in 1792, Tennessee in 1796, Ohio in 1803. Lewis and Clarke set out for 
the Pacific in 1804. The Louisiana Purchase was ratified in 1803, and Louisiana 
became a state in 1812. 


THE PERIOD OF GROWTH 


81 


lishman would have shrunk from as barbarous and unintelligible, 
and before long it began to leave its mark upon and to get direction 
and support from a distinctively national literature. 

That literature, however, was very slow in coming to a dignified, 
confident and autonomous estate. Down to Jefferson’s day it was 
almost wholly polemical, and hence lacking in the finer values; he 
himself, an insatiable propagandist and controversialist, was one of 
its chief ornaments. “The novelists and the historians, the essayists 
and the poets, whose names come to mind when American literature 
is mentioned,” says a recent literary historian, “have all flourished 
since 1800.” 8 Pickering, so late as 1816, said that “in this country 
we can hardly be said to have any .authors by profession,” and Jus¬ 
tice Story, three years later, repeated the saying and sought to ac¬ 
count for the fact. “So great,” said Story, “is the call for talents 
of all sorts in the active use of professional and other business in 
America that few of our ablest men have leisure to devote exclusively 
to literature or the fine arts. . . . This obvious reason will explain 
why we have so few professional authors, and those not among our 
ablest men.” All this was true, but a new day was dawning; Irving, 
in fact, had already published “Knickerbocker” and Bryant had 
printed “Thanatopsis.” Difficulties of communication hampered 
the circulation of the few native books that were written. “It is 
much to be regretted,” wrote Dr. David Ramsay, of Charleston, S. C., 
to Noah Webster in 1806, “that there is so little intercourse in a 
literary way between the states. As soon as a book of general utility 
comes out in any state it should be for sale in all of them.” Ramsay 
asked for little; the most he could imagine was a sale of 2,000 copies 
for an American work in America. But even that was far beyond 
the possibilities of the time. Nor was there, indeed, much reading 
of English books; the Americans, as in colonial days, were faithful 
to a few sober works, and cared little for belles lettres. “There is at 
this moment,” said an English observer in 1833, 9 “nothing in the 
United States worthy of the name of library. Not only is there an 
entire absence of learning, in the higher sense of the term, but an 

•Barrett Wendell: A Literary History of America; New York, 1900. 

•The anonymous author of Men and Manners in America; Edinburgh, 1833. 
See also Carl Van Doren’s The American Novel; New York, 1921, ch. i. 



82 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


absolute want of the material from which alone learning can be 
extracted. At present an American might study every book within 
the limits of the Union, and still be regarded in many parts of 
Europe—especially in Germany—as a man comparatively ignorant. 
Why does a great nation thus voluntarily continue in a state of intel¬ 
lectual destitution so anomalous and humiliating?” According to 
this critic, the value of the books imported from Europe during the 
fiscal year 1829-30 for public institutions came to but $10,829. 

But nevertheless English periodical literature seems to have been 
read, at least by the nascent intelligentsia, and its influence un¬ 
doubtedly helped to keep the national literature imitative and timor¬ 
ous in those early and perilous days. “Before the Revolution,” says 
Cairns, 10 “colonists of literary tastes prided themselves on reading 
the Gentlemen s Magazine or the London Magazine, and it is prob¬ 
able that the old tradition retained for these and similar publica¬ 
tions many subscribers. . . . Letters from American readers ap¬ 
pear occasionally in British magazines [of the period], and others 
imply the existence of a considerable American constituency. . . . 
It is certain, at all events, that the chief American [obviously a mis¬ 
print for British] critical journals were received by American edi¬ 
tors, and important criticisms of American writings were often re¬ 
printed in this country.” The extraordinary animosity of the Eng¬ 
lish and Scottish reviewers, then at the height of their pontifical 
authority, to all locutions that had an American smack was described 
in the last chapter; as everyone knows, that animosity extended to 
the content of American works as well as to the style. All things 
American, indeed, were under the ban in England after the War of 
1812, and Sydney Smith’s famous sneer—“In the four quarters of 
the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American 
play ? or looks at an American picture or statue ?”—was echoed and 
re-echoed in other planes. The Yankee, flushed with victory, be¬ 
came the pet abomination of the English, and the chief butt of the in¬ 
comparable English talent for moral indignation. There was scarcely 
an issue of the Quarterly Review, the Edinburgh, the Foreign Quar¬ 
terly, the British Review or Blackwood’s, for a generation following 
1812, in which he was not stupendously assaulted. Gifford, Sydney 
“British Criticisms of American Writings, 1783-1815; p. 20. 


THE PERIOD OF GROWTH 


83 


Smith and the poet Southey became specialists in this business; it 
almost took on the character of a holy war; even such mild men as 
Wordsworth had a hand in it. It was argued that the Americans 
were rogues and swindlers, that they lived in filth and squalor, that 
they were boors in social intercourse, that they were poltroons and 
savages in war, that they were depraved and criminal, that they 
were wholly devoid of the remotest notion of decency or honor. “See 
what it is,” said Southey in 1812, “to have a nation to take its place 
among civilized states before it has either gentlemen or scholars! 
They [the Americans] have in the course of twenty years acquired a 
distinct national character for low and lying knavery; and so well 
do they deserve it that no man ever had any dealings with them 
without having proofs of its truth.” The Quarterly, summing up in 
January, 1814, accused them of a multitude of strange and hair- 
raising offenses: employing naked colored women to wait upon their 
tables; kidnapping Scotchmen, Irishmen, Welshmen and Hollanders 
and selling them into slavery; fighting one another incessantly under 
rules which made it “allowable to peel the skull, tear out the eyes, 
and smooth away the nose”; and so on, and so on. Various Ameri¬ 
cans, after a decade of this snorting, went to the defense of their 
countrymen, among them Irving, Cooper, Timothy Dwight, J. K. 
Paulding, John Heal, Edward Everett and Robert Walsh. Paulding, 
in “John Bull in America, or, the New Munchausen,” published 
in 1825, attempted satire. Even a Briton, James Sterling, warned 
his fellow-Britons that, if they continued their intolerant abuse, they 
would “turn into bitterness the last drops of good-will toward Eng¬ 
land that exist in the United States.” But the denunciation kept 
up year after year, and there was, indeed, no genuine relief until 
1914, when the sudden prospect of disaster caused the English to 
change their tune, and even to find all their own great virtues in the 
degraded and disgusting Yankee, now so useful as a rescuer. This 
new enthusiasm for him was tried very severely by his slowness to 
come into the war, but in the main there was politeness for him so 
long as the emergency lasted, and all the British talent for horror 
and invective was concentrated, down to 1919 or thereabout, upon 
the Prussian. 

How American-English appeared to an educated English visitor of 


84 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


Jackson’s time is well indicated in the anonymous “Men and Man¬ 
ners in America” that I have already quoted. “The amount of bad 
grammar in circulation,” said the author, “is very great; that of 
barbarisms [ i. e., Americanisms] enormous.” Worse, these “bar¬ 
barisms” were not confined to the ignorant, but came almost as copi¬ 
ously from the lips of the learned. “I do not now speak,” explained 
the critic, “of the operative class, whose massacre of their mother- 
tongue, however inhuman, could excite no astonishment; but I allude 
to the great body of lawyers and traders; the men who crowd the 
exchange and the hotels; who are to be heard speaking in the courts, 
and are selected by their fellow-citizens to fill high and responsible 
offices. Even by this educated and respectable class, the commonest 
words are often so transmogrified as to be placed beyond recognition 
of an Englishman.” He then went on to describe some of the prev¬ 
alent “barbarisms”: 

The word does is split into two syllables, and pronounced do-es. Where, for 
some incomprehensible reason, is converted into 'where, there into there; and I 
remember, on mentioning to an acquaintance that I had called on a gentleman of 
taste in the arts, he asked “whether he shew (showed) me his pictures.” Such 
words as oratory and dilatory are pronounced with the penult syllable long and 
accented; missionary becomes missionairy, angel, Angel, danger, danger, etc. 

But this is not all. The Americans have chosen arbitrarily to change the 
meaning of certain old and established English words, for reasons they cannot 
explain, and which I doubt much whether any European philologist could under¬ 
stand. The word clever affords a case in point. It has here no connexion with 
talent, and simply means pleasant and (or) amiable. Thus a good-natured 
blockhead in the American vernacular is a clever man, and having had this 
drilled into me, I foolishly imagined that all trouble with regard to this word, 
at least, was at an end. It was not long, however, before I heard of a gentleman 
having moved into a clever house, another succeeding to a clever sum of money, 
of a third embarking in a clever ship, and making a clever voyage, with a 
clever cargo; and of the sense attached to the word in these various combina¬ 
tions, I could gain nothing like a satisfactory explanation. 

The privilege of barbarizing the King’s English is assumed by all ranks and 
conditions of men. Such words as slick, hedge and boss, it is true, are rarely 
used by the better orders; but they assume unlimited liberty in the use of 
expect, reckon, guess and calculate, and perpetrate other conversational anoma¬ 
lies with remorseless impunity. 

This Briton, as usual, was as full of moral horror as of grammatical 
disgust, and put his denunciation upon the loftiest of grounds. “I 
will not go on with this unpleasant subject,” he concluded, “nor 


THE PERIOD OF GROWTH 


85 


should I have alluded to it, hut I feel it something of a duty to express 
the natural feeling of an Englishman at finding the language of 
Shakespeare and Milton thus gratuitously degraded. Unless the 
present progress of change be arrested, by an increase of taste and 
judgment in the more educated classes, there can be no doubt that, 
in another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly 
unintelligible to an Englishman, and that the nation will be cut off 
from the advantages arising from their participation in British litera¬ 
ture. If they contemplate such an event with complacency, let them 
go on and prosper; they have only to progress in their present course, 
and their grandchildren bid fair to speak a jargon as novel and pe¬ 
culiar as the most patriotic American linguist can desire.” 11 

Such extravagant denunciations, in the long run, were bound to 
make Americans defiant, but while they were at their worst they 
produced a contrary effect. That is to say, they made all the Ameri¬ 
can writers of a more delicate aspiration extremely self-conscious and 
diffident. The educated classes, even against their will, were daunted 
by the torrent of abuse; they could not help finding in it an oc¬ 
casional reasonableness, an accidental true hit. The result, despite 
the efforts of Channing, Knapp and other such valiant defenders of 
the native author, was uncertainty and skepticism in native criticism. 
“The first step of an American entering upon a literary career,” says 
Lodge, writing of the first quarter of the century, “was to pretend to 
be an Englishman in order that he might win the approval, not of 
Englishmen, but of his own countrymen.” Cooper, in his first novel, 
“Precaution,” chose an English scene, imitated English models, and 
obviously hoped to placate the critics thereby. Irving, too, in his 
earliest work, showed a considerable discretion, and his “History of 
New York,” as everyone knows, was first published anonymously. 
But this puerile spirit did not last long. The English onslaughts 
were altogether too vicious to be received lying down; their very 
fury demanded that they be met with a united and courageous front. 
Cooper, in his second novel, “The Spy,” boldly chose an American 
setting and American characters, and though the influence of his wife, 

n For further diatribes of the same sort, see As Others See Us, by John 
Graham Brooks; New York, 1908, ch. vii. Also, The Cambridge History of 
American Literature, vol. i, pp. 205-8. 



86 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


who came of a Loyalist family, caused him to avoid any direct at¬ 
tack upon the English, he attacked them indirectly, and with great 
effect, by opposing an immediate and honorable success to their de¬ 
risions. “The Spy” ran through three editions in four months; it 
was followed by his long line of thoroughly American novels; in 
1834 he formally apologized to his countrymen for his early truancy 
in “Precaution.” Irving, too, soon adopted a bolder tone, and despite 
his English predilections, he refused an offer of a hundred guineas 
for an article for the Quarterly Review, made by Gifford in 1828, on 
the ground that “the Review has been so persistently hostile to our 
country that I cannot draw a pen in its service.” 

The same year saw the publication of the first edition of Web¬ 
ster’s American Dictionary of the English Language, and a year 
later followed Samuel L. Knapp’s “Lectures on American Litera¬ 
ture,” the first history of the national letters ever attempted. Knapp, 
in his preface, thought it necessary to prove, first of all, that an 
American literature actually existed, and Webster, in his introduc¬ 
tion, was properly apologetic, but there was no real need for timorousr 
ness in either case, for the American attitude toward the attack of 
the English was now definitely changing from uneasiness to defiance. 
The English critics, in fact, had overdone the thing, and though their 
clatter was to keep up for many years more, they no longer spread 
their old terror or had as much influence as of yore. Of a sudden, as 
if in answer to them, doubts turned to confidence, and then into the 
wildest sort of optimism, not only in politics and business, but also 
in what passed for the arts. Knapp boldly defied the English to pro¬ 
duce a “tuneful sister” surpassing Mrs. Sigourney; more, he argued 
that the Kew World, if only by reason of its superior scenic grandeur, 
would eventually hatch a poetry surpassing even that of Greece and 
Rome. “What are the Tibers and Scamanders,” he demanded, 
“measured by the Missouri and the Amazon ? Or what the loveliness 
of Illysus or Avon by the Connecticut or the Potomack ?” 

In brief, the national feeling, long delayed at birth, finally leaped 
into being in amazing vigor. “One can get an idea of the strength 
of that feeling,” says R. 0. Williams, “by glancing at almost any 
book taken at random from the American publications of the period. 


THE PERIOD OF GROWTH 


87 


Belief in the grand future of the United States is the keynote of 
everything said and done. All things American are to be grand— 
our territory, population, products, wealth, science, art—but es¬ 
pecially our political institutions and literature. The unbounded 
confidence in the material development of the country which now 
characterizes the extreme northwest of the United States prevailed as 
strongly throughout the eastern part of the Union during the first 
thirty years of the century; and over and above a belief in, and 
concern for, materialistic progress, there were enthusiastic anticipa¬ 
tions of achievements in all the moral and intellectual fields of na¬ 
tional greatness.” 12 Kor was that vast optimism wholly without 
warrant. An American literature was actually coming into being, 
and with a wall of hatred and contempt shutting in England, the new 
American writers were beginning to turn to the Continent for in¬ 
spiration and encouragement. Irving had already drunk at Spanish 
springs; Emerson and Bayard Taylor were to receive powerful im¬ 
pulses from Germany, following Ticknor, Bancroft and Everett be¬ 
fore them; Bryant was destined to go back to the classics. Moreover, 
Cooper and John P. Kennedy had shown the way to native sources 
of literary material, and Longfellow was making ready to follow 
them; novels in imitation of English models were no longer heard 
of; the ground was preparing for “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Finally, 
Webster himself, as Williams demonstrated, worked better than he 
knew. His American Dictionary was not only thoroughly American : 
it was superior to any of the current dictionaries of the English, so 
much so that for a good many years it remained “a sort of mine for 
British lexicography to exploit.” 

Thus all hesitations disappeared, and there arose a national con¬ 
sciousness so soaring and so blatant that it began to dismiss all 
British usage and opinion as puerile and idiotic. William L. Marcy, 
when Secretary of State under Pierce (1853-57), issued a circular 
to all American diplomatic and consular officers, loftily bidding them 
employ only “the American language” in communicating with him. 
The legislature of Indiana, in an act approved February 15, 1838, 

“Our Dictionaries and Other English Language Topics; New York, 1890, 
pp. 30-31. 


88 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


establishing the state university at Bloomington, 13 provided that it 
should instruct the youth of the new commonwealth (it had been ad¬ 
mitted to the Union in 1816) “in the American, learned and foreign, 
languages . . . and literature.” Such grandiose pronunciamentos 
well indicate and explain the temper of the era. 14 It was a time of 
expansion and braggadocio. The new republic would not only pro¬ 
duce a civilization and a literature of its own; it would show the way 
for all other civilizations and literatures. Rufus Wilmot Griswold, 
the enemy of Poe, rose from his decorous Baptist pew to protest 
that so much patriotism amounted to insularity and absurdity, but 
there seems to have been no one to second the motion. The debate 
upon the Oregon question gave a gaudy chance to the new breed of 
super-patriots, and they raged unchecked until the time of the Civil 
War. Thornton, in his Glossary, quotes a typical speech in Con¬ 
gress, the subject being the American eagle and the orator being the 
Hon. Samuel C. Pomeroy, of Kansas. I give a few strophes: 

The proudest bird upon the mountain is upon the American ensign, and not 
one feather shall fall from her plumage there. She is American in design, and 
an emblem of wildness and freedom. I say again, she has not perched herself 
upon American standards to die there. Our great western valleys were never 
scooped out for her burial place. Nor were the everlasting, untrodden moun¬ 
tains piled for her monument. Niagara shall not pour her endless waters for 
her requiem; nor shall our ten thousand rivers weep to the ocean in eternal 
tears. No, sir, no! Unnumbered voices shall come up from river, plain, and 
mountain, echoing the songs of our triumphant deliverance, wild lights from a 
thousand hill-tops will betoken the rising of the sun of freedom. 

The vast shock of the Civil War, with its harsh disillusions, un¬ 
horsed the optimists for a space, and little was heard from them for 
some time thereafter. But while the Jackson influence survived and 
the West was being conquered, it was the unanimous conviction of 
all good Americans that “he who dallies is a dastard, and he who 
doubts is damned.” 

13 It is curious to note that the center of population of the United States, 
according to the census of 1910, was “in southern Indiana, in the western part 
of Bloomington city, Monroe county.” Cf. The Language We Use, by Alfred 
Z. Reed, New York Sun, March 13, 1918. 

11 Support also came from abroad. Czar Nicholas I, of Russia, smarting under 
his defeat in the Crimea, issued an order that his own state papers should be 
prepared in Russian and American—not English. 


THE PERIOD OF GROWTH 


89 


2 . 

The Language in the Making 

All this jingoistic bombast, however, was directed toward defend¬ 
ing, not so much the national vernacular as the national belles lettres. 
True enough, an English attack upon a definite American locution 
always brought out certain critical minute-men, hut in the main 
they were anything but hospitable to the racy neologisms that kept 
crowding up from below, and most of them were eager to be accepted 
as masters of orthodox English and very sensitive to the charge that 
their writing was bestrewn with Americanisms. A glance through 
the native criticism of the time will show how ardently even the most 
uncompromising patriots imitated the Johnsonian jargon then 
fashionable in England. Fowler and Griswold followed pantinglv 
in the footsteps of Macaulay; their prose is extraordinarily self-con¬ 
scious, and one searches it in vain for any concession to colloquialism. 
Poe, the master of them all, achieved a style so ornate that many an 
English leader-writer must have studied it with envy. A few holder 
spirits, as we have seen, spoke out for national freedom in language 
as well as in letters—among them, Channing—but in the main the 
Brahmins of the time were conservatives in this department and it is 
difficult to imagine Emerson or Irving or Bryant sanctioning the in¬ 
novations later adopted so easily by Howells. Lowell and Walt 
Whitman, in fact, were the first men of letters, properly so called, 
to give specific assent to the great changes that were firmly fixed in 
the national speech during the half century between the War of 1812 
and the Civil War. Lowell did so in his preface to the second series 
of “The Biglow Papers.” Whitman made his declaration in “An 
American Primer.” In discussing “Leaves of Grass,” he said: “I 
sometimes think that the entire book is only a language experiment— 
that it is an attempt to give the spirit, the body and the man, new 
words, new potentialities of speech—an American, a cosmopolitan 
(for the best of America is the best cosmopolitanism) range of self- 
expression.” And then: “The Americans are going to he the most 
fluent and melodious-voiced people in the world—and the most 
perfect users of words. The new world, the new times, the new 


90 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


people, tlie new vistas need a new tongue according—yes, what is 
more, they will have such a new tongue—will not be satisfied until 
it is evolved.” 15 According to Louis Untermeyer, a diligent and 
enthusiastic Whitmanista, old Walt deserves to be called “the father 
of the American language.” 16 He goes on: 

This, in spite of its grandiloquent sound, is what he truly was. When the rest 
of literary America was still indulging in the polite language of pulpits and 
the lifeless rhetoric of its libraries, Whitman not only sensed the richness and 
vigor of the casual word, the colloquial phrase—he championed the vitality of 
slang, the freshness of our quickly assimilated jargons, the indigenous beauty 
of vulgarisms. He even predicted that no future native literature could exist 
that neglected this racy speech, that the vernacular of people as opposed to the 
language of literati would form the living accents of the best poets to come. 
One has only to observe the contemporary works of Carl Sandburg, Robert 
Frost, James Oppenheim, Edgar Lee Masters, John Hall Wheelock, Vachel 
Lindsay and a dozen others to see how Whitman’s prophecy has been fulfilled. 

W'ords, especially the neglected words regarded as too crude and literal for 
literature, fascinated Whitman. The idea of an enriched language was scarcely 
ever out of his mind. . . . This interest . . . grew to great proportions; it 
became almost an obsession. 

Whitman bimself spoke of “An American Primer” as “an at¬ 
tempt to describe the growth of an American English enjoying a dis¬ 
tinct identity.” He proposed an American dictionary containing the 
actual everyday vocabulary of the people. To quote him again: 

The Real Dictionary will give all words that exist in use, the bad words as 
well as any. The Real Grammar will be that which declares itself a nucleus of 
the spirit of the laws, with liberty to all to carry out the spirit of the laws; 
even by violating them, if necessary. 

Many of the slang words are our best; slang words among fighting men, 
gamblers, thieves, are powerful words. . . . Much of America is shown in these 
and in newspaper names, and in names of characteristic amusements and 
games. . . . 

Our tongue is full of strong words, native or adopted, to express the blood-born 
passion of the race for rudeness and resistance, as against mere polish. . . . 
These words are alive and sinewy—they walk, look, step with an air of com¬ 
mand. . . . 

15 An American Primer was not printed until 1904, long after Whitman’s death. 
As originally written in the 50’s and 60’s, it consisted of notes for a lecture. 
Among Whitman’s papers, Horace Traubel found this alternative title: The 
Primer of Words: For American Young Men and Women, For Literati, Orators, 
Teachers, Judges, Presidents, etc. 

18 Whitman and the American Language, New York Evening Post , May 31, 



THE PERIOD OF GROWTH 


91 


Ten thousand native idiomatic words are growing, or are already grown, 
out of which vast numbers could be used by American writers, with meaning 
and effect—words that would give that taste of identity and locality which is 
so dear in literature—words that would be welcomed by the nation, being of 
the national blood. 

As everyone knows, Whitman delighted in filling his poetry and 
prose with such new words, among them, the verbs to promulge, to 
eclaircise, to diminute, to imperturbe, to effuse and to inure, the ad¬ 
jectives ostent and adamic, the adverb affetuoso, and the nouns 
camerado, romanza, deliveress, literatus, acceptress and partiolist. 
Many of his coinages were in Spanish metal; he believed that Amer¬ 
ican should not be restricted to the materials of English. I have 
heard it argued that he introduced finale into everyday American; 
the evidence is dubious, but certainly the word is much oftener used 
in the United States than in England. Most of his coinages, alas, died 
with him, just as ridiculosity died with its inventor, Charles Sum¬ 
ner, who announced its. invention to the Senate with great formality, 
and argued that it would be justified by the analogy of curiosity. But 
These States has survived. 

Meanwhile, though conservatism lingered on the planes above 
Whitman, there was a wild and lawless development of the lan¬ 
guage on the planes below him, among the unfettered democrats of 
his adoration, and in the end the words and phrases thus brought to 
birth forced themselves into recognition, and profited by the literary 
declaration of independence of their very opponents. “The jus et 
norma loquendi,” said W. R. Morfill, the English philologist, “do 
not depend upon scholars.” Particularly in a country where scholar¬ 
ship is still new and wholly cloistered, and the overwhelming major¬ 
ity of the people are engaged upon novel and highly exhilarating 
tasks, far away from schools and with a gigantic cockiness in their 
hearts. The remnants of the Puritan civilization had been wiped 
out by the rise of the proletariat under Jackson, and whatever was 
fine and sensitive in it had died with it. What remained of an urbane 
habit of mind and utterance began to be confined to the narrowing 
feudal areas of the south and to the still narrower refuge of the 
Boston Brahmins, now, for the first time, a definitely recognized 
caste of intelligentsia ., self-charged with carrying the torch of culture 


92 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


through a new Dark Age. The typical American, in Paulding’s 
satirical phrase, became “a bundling, gouging, impious” fellow, with¬ 
out either “morals, literature, religion or refinement.” Next to the 
savage struggle for land and dollars, party politics was the chief 
concern of the people, and with the disappearance of the old leaders 
and the entrance of pushing upstarts from the backwoods, political 
controversy sank to an incredibly low level. Bartlett, in the intro¬ 
duction to the second edition of his Glossary, described the effect 
upon the language. First the enfranchised mob, whether in the city 
wards or along the western rivers, invented fantastic slang-words and 
turns of phrase; then they were “seized upon by stump-speakers at 
political meetings”; then they were heard in Congress; then they got 
into the newspapers; and finally they came into more or less good 
usage. Much contemporary evidence is to the same effect. Fowler, 
in listing “low expressions” in 1850, described them as “chiefly politi¬ 
cal.” “The vernacular tongue of the country,” said Daniel Webster, 
“has become greatly vitiated, depraved and corrupted by the style of 
the congressional debates.” Thornton, in the appendix to his Glos¬ 
sary, gives some astounding specimens of congressional oratory be¬ 
tween the 20’s and 60’s, and many more will reward the explorer who 
braves the files of the Congressional Globe. This flood of racy and 
unprecedented words and phrases beat upon and finally penetrated 
the retreat of the literati , but the purity of speech cultivated there 
had little compensatory influence upon the vulgate. The newspaper 
was enthroned, and belles lettres were cultivated almost in private, 
and as a mystery. It is probable, indeed, that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” 
and “Ten Nights in a Bar-room,” both published in the early 50’s, 
were the first contemporary native books, after Cooper’s day, that the 
American people, as a people, ever read. Nor did the pulpit, now 
fast falling from its old high estate, lift a corrective voice. On the 
contrary, it joined the crowd, and Bartlett denounced it specifically 
for its bad example, and cited, among its crimes against the language, 
such inventions as to doxologize and to funeralize. To these novelties, 
apparently without any thought of their uncouthness, Fowler added 
to missionate and consociational. 

As I say, the pressure from below broke down the defenses of the 
purists, and literally forced a new national idiom upon them. Pen 


THE PERIOD OF GROWTH 


93 


in Rand, they might still achieve laborious imitations of Johnson and 
Macaulay, but their mouths began to betray them. “When it comes 
to talking,” wrote Charles Astor Bristed for Englishmen in 1855, 
“the most refined and best educated American, who has habitually 
resided in his own country, the very man who would write, on some 
serious topic, volumes in which no peculiarity could be detected, 
will, in half a dozen sentences, use at least as many words that cannot 
fail to strike the inexperienced Englishman who hears them for the 
first time.” Bristed gave a specimen of the American of that time, 
calculated to flabbergast his inexperienced Englishman; you will find 
it in the volume of Cambridge Essays, already cited. H!is aim was 
to explain and defend Americanisms, and so shut off the storm of 
English reviling, and he succeeded in producing one of the most 
thoughtful and persuasive essays on the subject ever written. But 
his purpose failed and the attack kept up, and eight years afterward 
the Very Bev. Henry Alford, D.D., dean of Canterbury, led a 
famous assault. “Look at those phrases,” he said, “which so amuse 
us in their speech and books; at their reckless exaggeration and con¬ 
tempt for congruity; and then compare the character and history 
of the nation—its blunted sense of moral obligation and duty to man; 
its open disregard of conventional right where aggrandisement is to 
be obtained; and I may now say, its reckless and fruitless mainte¬ 
nance of the most cruel and unprincipled war in the history of the 
world.” 17 In his American edition of 1866 Dr. Alford withdrew 
this reference to the Civil War and somewhat ameliorated his indig¬ 
nation otherwise, but he clung to the main counts in his indictment, 
and most Englishmen, I daresay, still give them a certain support. 
The American is no longer a “vain, egotistical, insolent, rodomontade 
sort of fellow”; America is no longer the “brigand confederation” of 
the Foreign Quarterly or “the loathsome creature, . . . maimed and 
lame, full of sores and ulcers” of Dickens; but the Americanism is 
yet regarded with a dubious eye, and pounced upon a bit too joyously 
when found. Even the friendliest English critics seem to be daunted 
by the gargantuan copiousness of American inventions in speech. 
Their position, perhaps, was well stated by Capt. Basil Hall, author 

1T A Plea for the Queen’s English; London, 1863; 2nd ed., 1864; American 
ed., New York, 1866. 


94 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


of the celebrated “Travels in North America/’ in 1827. When he 
argued that “surely such innovations are to be deprecated/’ an 
American asked him this question: “If a word becomes universally 
current in America, why should it not take its station in the lan¬ 
guage?” “Because,” replied Hall in all seriousness, “there are 
words enough in our language already.” 


3. 

The Expanding Vocabulary 

A glance at some of the characteristic coinages of the time, as they 
are revealed in the Congressional Globe , in contemporary newspapers 
and political tracts, and in that grotesque small literature of humor 
which began with Judge Thomas C. Haliburton’s “Sam Slick” in 
1835, is almost enough to make one sympathize with Dean Alford. 
Bartlett quotes to doxologize from the Christian Disciple, a quite 
reputable religious paper of the 40’s. To citizenize was used and 
explained by Senator Young, of Illinois, in the Senate on February 
1, 1841, and he gave Noah Webster as authority for it. To funercdize 
and to missionate, along with consociational, were contributions of the 
backwoods pulpit; perhaps it also produced hell-roaring and hellion, 
the latter of which was a favorite of the Mormons and even got into 
a sermon by Henry Ward Beecher. To deacon, a verb of decent mien 
in colonial days, signifying to read a hymn line by line, responded 
to the rough humor of the time, and began to mean to swindle or 
adulterate, e. g., to put the largest berries at the top of the box, to 
extend one’s fences sub rosa, or to mix sand with sugar. A great rage 
for extending the vocabulary by the use of suffixes seized upon the 
com-fed etymologists, and they produced a formidable new vocabu¬ 
lary in -ize, -ate, -ify, -acy, -ous and -went. Such inventions as to 
obligate, to concertize, to questionize, retiracy, savagerous, coatee 
(a sort of diminutive for coat) and citified appeared in the popular 
vocabulary and even got into more or less good usage. Fowler, in 
1850, cited publishment and releasement with no apparent thought 
that they were uncouth. And at the same time many verbs were 


THE PERIOD OF GROWTH 


95 


made by the simple process of back formation, as, to resurrect, to 
excurt, to resolute, to burgle 18 and to enthuse. 19 

Some of these inventions, after flourishing for a generation or 
more, were retired with blushes during the period of plush 
elegance following the Civil War, but a large number have survived 
to our own day, and are in good usage. Not even the most bilious pur¬ 
ist would think of objecting to to affiliate, to endorse, to collide, to 
jeopardize, to predicate, to progress, to itemize, to resurrect or to 
Americanize today, and yet all of them gave grief to the judicious 
when they first appeared in the debates of Congress, brought there 
by statesmen from the backwoods. Nor to such simpler verbs of the 
period as to comer (i. e., the market), to boss and to lynch. 20 Nor 
perhaps to to boom, to boost, to kick (in the sense of to protest), 
to coast (on a sled), to engineer, to chink (i. e., logs), to feaze, to 
splurge, to bulldoze, to aggravate (in the sense of to anger), to yank 
and to crawfish. These verbs have entered into the very fibre of the 
American vulgate, and so have many nouns derived from them, e. g., 
boomer, boom-town, bouncer, kicker, kick, splurge, roller-coaster. 
A few of them, e. g., to collide and to feaze, were archaic English 
terms brought to new birth; a few others, e. g., to holler 21 and 
to muss, were obviously mere corruptions. But a good many others, 
e. g., to bulldoze, to hornswoggle and to scoot, were genuine inven¬ 
tions, and redolent of the soil. 

With the new verbs came a great swarm of verb-phrases, some of 

18 J. R. Ware, in Passing English of the Victorian Era, says that to burgle 
was introduced to London by W. S. Gilbert in The Pirates of Penzance (April 3, 
1880). It was used in America 30 years before. 

19 This process, of course, is philologically respectable, however uncouth its 
occasional products may be. By it we have acquired many every-day words, 
among them, to accept (from acceptum), to exact (from exactum), to darkle 
(from darkling ), and pea (from pease — pois). 

“All authorities save one seem to agree that this verb is a pure Americanism, 
and that it is derived from the name of Charles Lynch, a Virginia justice of the 
peace, who jailed many Loyalists in 1780 without warrant in law. The dissen¬ 
tient, Bristed, says that to linch is in various northern English dialects, and 
means to beat or maltreat. The history of the word is discussed at length 
in an article in the Lynchburg (Va.) News, July 30, 1922. 

21 The correct form of this appears to be halloo or holloa, but in America 
it is pronounced holler and usually represented in print by hollo or hollow. 
I have often encountered holloed in the past tense. But the Public Printer 
frankly accepts holler. Vide the Congressional Record, May 12, 1917, p. 2309. 
The word, in the form of hollering, is here credited to “Hon.” John L. Burnett, 
of Alabama. Hello is apparently a variation of the same word. 


96 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


them short and pithy and others extraordinarily elaborate, but all 
showing the true national talent for condensing a complex thought, 
and often a whole series of thoughts, into a vivid and arresting image. 
Of the first class are to fill the bill, to fizzle out, to make tracks, 
to peter out, to plank down, to go back on, to keep tab, to light out 
and to back water. Side by side with them we have inherited such 
common coins of speech as to make the fur fly, to cut a swath, to 
know him like a book, to keep a stiff upper lip, to cap the climax, 
to handle without gloves, to freeze on to, to go it blind, to pull wool 
over his eyes, to have the floor, to know the ropes, to get solid with, 
to spread one's self, to run into the ground, to dodge the issue, to 
paint the town red, to take a back seat and to get ahead of. These 
are so familiar that we use them and hear them without thought; 
they seem as authentically parts of the English idiom as to be left 
at the post. And yet, as the labors of Thornton have demonstrated, 
all of them are of American nativity, and the circumstances sur¬ 
rounding the origin of some of them have been accurately determined. 
Many others are palpably the products of the great movement toward 
the West, for example, to pan out, to strike it rich, to jump or enter 
a claim, to pull up stakes, to rope in, to die with one's boots on, 
to get the deadwood on, to get the drop, to back and fill, to do a land- 
office business and to get the bulge on. And in many others the 
authentic American is no less plain, for example, in to kick the 
bucket, to put a bug in his ear, to see the elephant, to crack up, to do 
up brown, to bark up the wrong tree, to jump on with both feet, to go 
the whole hog, to make a kick, to buck the tiger, to let it slide and 
to come out at the little end of the horn. To play possum belongs 
to this list. To it Thornton adds to knock into a cocked hat, despite 
its English sound, and to have an ax to grind. To go for, both in 
the sense of belligerency and in that of partisanship, is also American, 
and so is to go through (i. e., to plunder). 

Of adjectives the list is scarcely less long. Among the coinages of 
the first half of the century that are in good use today are non-com¬ 
mittal, highfalutin, well-posted, down-town, two-fer, played-out, flat- 
footed, whole-souled and true-blue. The first appears in a Senate 
debate of 1841; highfalutin in a political speech of the same decade. 
Both are useful words; it is impossible, not employing them, to 


THE PERIOD OF GROWTH 


97 


convey the ideas behind them without circumlocution. The use of 
slim in the sense of meagre, as in slim chance, slim attendance and 
slim support, goes back still further. The English use small in place 
of it. Other, and less respectable contributions of the time are 
brash, bogus, brainy, peart, loco(ed), picayune, scary, well- 
heeled, hardshell ( e. g., Baptist), low-flung, codfish (to indicate op¬ 
probrium) and go-to-meeting. The use of plumb as an adverb, 
as in plumb crazy, is an English archaism that was revived in the 
United States in the early years of the century. In the more ortho¬ 
dox adverbial form of plump it still survives, for example, in “she 
fell plump into his arms.” But this last is also good English. 

The characteristic American substitution of mad for angry goes 
back to the eighteenth century, and perhaps denotes the survival of 
an English provincialism. Witherspoon noticed it and denounced it 
in 1781, and in 1816 Pickering called it “low” and said that it was 
not used “except in very familiar conversation.” But it got into 
much better odor soon afterward, and by 1840 it passed unchallenged. 
Its use is one of the peculiarities that Englishmen most quickly 
notice in American colloquial speech today. In formal written dis¬ 
course it is less often encountered, probably because the English 
marking of it has so conspicuously singled it out. But it is con¬ 
stantly met with in the newspapers and in the Congressional Record, 
and it is not infrequently used by such writers as Anderson and 
Dreiser. In the familiar simile, as mad as a hornet, it is used in 
the American sense. But as mad as a March hare is English, and 
connotes insanity, not mere anger. The English meaning of the 
word is preserved in mad-house and mad-dog, but I have often no¬ 
ticed that American rustics, employing the latter term, derive from 
it a vague notion, not that the dog is demented, but that it is in a 
simple fury. Erom this notion, perhaps, comes the popular belief 
that dogs may be thrown into hydrophobia by teasing and badgering 
them. 

It was not, however, among the verbs and adjectives that the 
American word-coiners of the first half of the century achieved their 
gaudiest innovations, but among the substantives. Here they had 
temptation and excuse in plenty, for innumerable new objects and 
relations demanded names, and they exercised their fancy with- 


98 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


out restraint. Setting aside loan words, whicli will be considered 
later, three main varieties of new nouns were thus produced. The 
first consisted of English words rescued from obsolescence or changed 
in meaning, the second of compounds manufactured of the common 
materials of the mother-tongue, and the third of entirely new inven¬ 
tions. Of the first class, good specimens are deck (of cards), gulch, 
gully and billion, the first three old English words restored to usage 
in America and the last a sound English word changed in meaning. 
Of the second class, examples are offered by gum-shoe, mortgage- 
shark, carpet-bagger, cut-off, mass-meeting, dead-beat, dug-out, shot¬ 
gun, stag-party, wheat-pit, horse-sense, chipped-beef, oyster-supper, 
buzz-saw, chainrgang and hell-box. And of the third there are in¬ 
stances in buncombe, greaser, conniption, bloomer, campus, galoot, 
maverick, roustabout, bugaboo and blizzard. 

Of these coinages perhaps those of the second class are most numer¬ 
ous and characteristic. In them American exhibits one of its most 
marked tendencies: a habit of achieving short cuts in speech by a 
process of agglutination. Why explain laboriously, as an English¬ 
man might, that the notes of a new bank (in a day of innumerable 
new banks) are insufficiently secure ? Call them wild-cat notes and 
have done! Why describe a gigantic rain storm with the lame adj ec- 
tives of everyday? Call it a cloud-burst and immediately a vivid 
picture of it is conjured up. Rough-neck is a capital word; it is 
more apposite and savory than the English navvy, and it is over¬ 
whelmingly more American. 22 Square-meal is another. Fire-eater 
is yet another. And the same instinct for the terse, the eloquent and 
the picturesque is in boiled-shirt, blow-out, big-bug, claim-jumper, 
spread-eagle, come-down, back-number, claw-hammer (coat), bottom- 
dollar, poppy-cock, cold-snap, back-talk, back-taxes, calamity-howler, 
fire-bug, grab-bag, grip-sack, grub-stake, pay-dirt, tender-foot, stock¬ 
ing-feet, ticket-scalper, store-clothes, small-potatoes, cake-walk, 
prairie-schooner, round-up, snake-fence, flat-boat, under-the-weather, 
on-the-hoof, and jumping-off-place. These compounds (there are 
thousands of them) have been largely responsible for giving the 
language its characteristic tang and color. Such specimens as bell- 

13 Rough-neck is often cited, in discussions of slang, as a latter-day invention, 
but Thornton shows that it was used in Texas in 1836. 


THE PERIOD OF GROWTH 


99 

"hop, semi-occasional, chair-warmer and down-and-out are as dis¬ 
tinctively American as baseball or tbe quick-lunch. 

The spirit of the language appears scarcely less clearly in some of 
the coinages of the other classes. There are, for example, the English 
words that have been extended or restricted in meaning, e. g., docket 
(for court calendar), betterment (for improvement to property), 
collateral (for security), crank (for fanatic), jumper (for tunic), 
tickler (for memorandum or reminder), 23 carnival (in such phrases 
as carnival of crime), scrape (for fight or difficulty), 24 flurry (of 
snow, or in the market), suspenders, diggings (for habitation) and 
range. Again, there are the new assemblings of English materials, 
e. g., doggery, rowdy, teetotaler, goatee, tony and cussedness. Yet 
again, there are the purely artificial words, e. g., sockdolager, hunky- 
dory, scalawag, guyascutis, spondulix, slumgullion, rambunctious, 
scrumptious, to skedaddle, to absquatulate and to exfluncticate. 25 
In the use of the last-named coinages fashions change. In the 40’s 
to absquatulate was in good usage, but it has since disappeared. Most 
of the other inventions of the time, however, have to some extent 
survived, and it would be difficult to find an American of today who 
did not know the meaning of scalawag and rambunctious and who 
did not occasionally use them. A whole series of artificial Amer¬ 
ican words groups itself around the prefix ker, for example, 
leer-flop, ker-splash, ker-thump, ker-bang, ker-plunk, ker-slam and 
ker-flummux. This prefix and its onomatopoeic daughters have been 
borrowed by the English, but Thornton and Ware agree that it is 
American. Several of my correspondents suggest that it may have 

been suggested by the German prefix ge -that it may represent a 

humorous attempt to make German words by analogy, e. g., geflop, 
gesplash, etc. I pass on this guess for what it is worth. Certainly 
such American-German words must have been manufactured fre¬ 
quently by the earliest “Dutch” comedians, and it is quite possible 
that some of them got into the language, and that the ge- was subse¬ 
quently changed to ker-. 

a This use goes back to 1839. 

“Thornton gives an example dated 1812. Of late the word has lost its final 
e and shortened its vowel, becoming scrap. 

“ Cf. Terms of Approbation and Eulogy, by Elsie L. Warnock, Dialect Notes, 
vol. iv, part 1, 1913. Among the curious recent coinages cited by Miss War¬ 
nock are scallyicampus, supergobosnoptious, hyperfirmatious, and sorumdifferous. 


100 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


In the first chapter I mentioned the superior imaginativeness 
revealed by Americans in meeting linguistic emergencies, whereby, 
for example, in seeking names for new objects introduced by the 
building of railroads, they surpassed the English 'plough and crossing- 
plate with cow-catcher and frog. That was in the 30’s. Already at 
that day the two languages were so differentiated that they produced 
wholly distinct railroad nomenclatures. Such commonplace Ameri¬ 
can terms as box-car, caboose and air-line are unknown in England. 
So are freight-car, flagman, towerman, switch, switching-engine, 
switch-yard, switchman, track-walker, engineer, baggage-room, bag¬ 
gage-check, baggage-smasher, accommodation-train, baggage-master, 
conductor, express-car, flat-car, hand-car, way-bill, expressman, 
express-office, fast-freight, wrecking-crew, jerk-water, commutation- 
ticket, commuter, round-trip, mileage-book, ticket-scalper, depot, 
limited, hot-box, iron-horse, stop-oxer, tie, rail, fish-plate, mm, train- 
boy, chair-car, club-car, diner, sleeper, bumpers, mail-clerk, passenger- 
coach, day-coach, railroad-man, ticket-office, truck and right-of-way, 
not to mention the verbs, to flag, to express, to dead-head, to side¬ 
swipe, to stop-over, to fire (i. e., a locomotive), to switch, to side¬ 
track, to railroad, to commute, and to clear the track. These 
terms are in constant use in America; their meaning is famil¬ 
iar to all Americans; many of them have given the language everyday 
figures of speech. 26 But the majority of them would puzzle an Eng¬ 
lishman, just as the English luggage-van, permanent-way, goods- 
waggon, guard, carrier, booking-office, railway-rug, R. S. 0. (railway 
sub-office), tripper, line, points, shunt, metals and bogie would puzzle 
the average untraveled American. 

In two other familiar fields very considerable differences between 
English and American are visible; in both fields they go back to the 
era before the Civil War. They are politics and that department of 
social intercourse which has to do with drinking. Many characteris¬ 
tic American political terms originated in revolutionary days and 
have passed over into English. Of such sort are caucus and mileage. 
But the majority of those in common use today were coined during 
the extraordinarily exciting campaigns following the defeat of Adams 

26 E. g., single-track mind, to jump the rails, to collide head-on, broad-gauge 
man, to walk the ties, blind-baggage, underground-railroad, tank-toion. 


THE PERIOD OF GROWTH 


101 


by Jefferson. Charles Ledyard Norton has devoted a whole book to 
their etymology and meaning; 27 the number is far too large for a 
list of them to be attempted here. But a few characteristic specimens 
may be recalled, for example, the simple agglutinates: omnibus-bill, 
banner-state, favorite-son, anxious-bench, gag-rule, executive-session, 
mass-meeting, office-seeker and straight-ticketj the humorous meta¬ 
phors : pork-barrel, pie-counter, wire-puller, land-slide, carpet-bagger, 
lame-duck and on the fence; the old words put to new uses: plank, 
pull, platform, machine, precinct, slate, primary, floater, repeater, 
bolter, stalwart, filibuster, regular and fences; the new coinages: 
gerrymander, heeler, buncombe, roorback, mugwump and to bulldoze; 
the new derivatives: abolitionist, candidacy, boss-rule, per-diem, to 
lobby and boodler; and the almost innumerable verbs and verb- 
phrases: to knife, to split a ticket, to go up Salt River, to bolt, to eat 
crow, to boodle, to divvy, to grab and to run. An English candidate 
never runs; he stands. To run, according to Thornton, was already 
used in America in 1789; it was universal by 1820. Platform came 
in at the same time. Machine was first applied to a political organ¬ 
ization by Aaron Burr. The use of mugwump is commonly thought 
to have originated in the Blaine campaign of 1884, but it really goes 
back to the 30’s. Anxious-bench (or anxious-seat ) at first designated 
only the place occupied by the penitent at revivals, but was used in its 
present political sense in Congress so early as 1842. Banner-state 
appears in Niles' Register for December 5, 1840. Favorite-son 
appears in an ode addressed to Washington on his visit to Ports¬ 
mouth, N. H., in 1789, but it did not acquire its present ironical 
sense until it was applied to Martin Van Buren. Thornton has traced 
bolter to 1812, filibuster to 1863, roorback to 1844, and split-ticket 
to 1842. Regularity was an issue in Tammany Hall in 1822. 28 
There were primaries in New York city in 1827, and hundreds of 
repeaters voted. In 1829 there were lobby-agents at Albany, and 
they soon became lobbyists; in 1832 lobbying had already extended 
to Washington. All of these terms are now as firmly imbedded in 
the American vocabulary as election or congressman. 

37 Political Americanisms . . .: New York and London, 1890. 

“Gustavus Myers: The History of Tammany Hall; 2nd ed.; New York, 


102 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


In the department of conviviality the imaginativeness of Ameri¬ 
cans was shown both in the invention and in the naming of new and 
often highly complex beverages. So vast was the production of novel¬ 
ties in the days before Prohibition, in fact, that England borrowed 
many of them and their names with them. And not only England: 
one buys cocktails and gin-fizzes to this day in “American bars” that 
stretch from Paris to Yokohama. Cocktail, stone-fence and sherry- 
cobbler were mentioned by Irving in 1809; 29 by Thackeray’s time 
they were already well-known in England. Thornton traces the 
sling to 1788, and the stinkibus and antirfogmatic, both now extinct, 
to the same year. The origin of the rickey, fizz, sour, cooler, skin, 
shrub and smash, and of such curious American drinks as the horse s 
neck, Mamie Taylor, Tom-and-Jerry, Tom-Collins, John-Collins, 
bishop, stone-wall, gimfix, brandy-champarelle, golden-slipper, hari- 
kari, locomotive, whiskey-daisy, blue-blazer, black-stripe, white-plush 
and brandy-crusta remains to be established; the historians of alco¬ 
holism, like the philologists, have neglected them. 30 But the essen¬ 
tially American character of most of them is obvious, despite the fact 
that a number have gone over into English. The English, in naming 
their drinks, commonly display a far more limited imagination. 
Seeking a name, for example, for a mixture of whiskey and soda- 
water, the best they could achieve was whiskey-and- soda. The Ameri¬ 
cans, introduced to the same drink, at once gave it the far more origi¬ 
nal name of high-ball. So with ginger-ale and ginger-pop. 2,1 So with 
minerals and soft-drinks. Other characteristic Americanisms (a few 

“Knickerbocker’s History of New York; New York, 1809, p. 241. 

,0 Extensive lists of such drinks, with their ingredients, are to be found in 
The Hoffman House Bartender’s Guide, by Charles Mahoney, 4th ed.; New York, 
1916; in The Barkeeper’s Manual, by Raymond E. Sullivan, 4th ed.; Baltimore, 
n.d., and in Wehman Brothers’ Bartenders’ Guide; New York, 1912. An early 
list, from the Lancaster (Pa.) Journal of Jan. 26, 1821, is quoted by Thornton, 
vol. ii, p. 985. The treatise by Prof. Sullivan (whose great talents I often 
enjoyed at the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore before the Methodist hellenium) 
is particularly interesting. The sale of all such books, I believe, is now pro¬ 
hibited, but they may be consulted by scholars in the Library of Congress. 

“An English correspondent writes: “Did the Americans invent ginger-ale 
and ginger-popf Then why don’t they make some that is drinkable? Do you 
know of a decent unimported dry ginger? Ginger-pop, in England, is ginger-beer, 
an article rarely seen in America. Stone-ginger is the only temperance drink 
worth a damn, perhaps because, properly made, it contains a certain amount 
of alcohol. It is brewed, not charged with CO,. Where in America can I buy 
stone-ginger; that is to say, ginger-beer from a brewery, sold in stone bottles? 
We say pop in England, but not ginger-pop .” 



THE PERIOD OF GROWTH 


103 


of them borrowed by the English) are red-eye, corn-juice, eye-opener, 
forty-rod, squirrel-whiskey, phlegm-cutter, moon-shine, hard-cider, 
apple-jack and corpse-reviver, and the auxiliary drinking terms, 
speak-easy, boot-legger, sample-room, blind-pig, barrel-house, bouncer, 
bung-starter, dive, doggery, schooner, moonshine, shell, stick, duck, 
straight, hooch, saloon, finger and chaser. Thornton shows that jag, 
bust, bat and to crook the elbow are also Americanisms. So are bar¬ 
tender and saloon-keeper. To them might be added a long list of 
common American synonyms for drunk, for example, piffled, 
pifflicated, awry-eyed, tanked, snooted, stewed, ossified, slopped, 
fiddled, edged, loaded, het-up, frazzled, jugged, soused, jiggered, 
corned, jagged and bunned. Farmer and Henley list corned and 
jagged among English synonyms, but the former is probably an 
Americanism derived from corn-whiskey or corn-juice, and Thornton 
says that the latter originated on this side of the Atlantic also. 


4. 


Loan-Words and Non-English Influences 

The Indians of the new West, it would seem, had little to add to 
the contributions already made to the American vocabulary by the 
Algonquins of the Northwest. The American people, by the begin¬ 
ning of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, knew almost 
all they were destined to know of the aborigines, and they had names 
for all the new objects thus brought to their notice and for most of 
the red man’s peculiar ceremonials. A few translated Indian terms, 
e. g., squaw-man, Great White Father, Father of Waters, and happy- 
hunting ground, represent the meagre fresh stock that the western 
pioneers got from him. Of more importance was the suggestive and 
indirect effect of his polysynthetic dialects, and particularly of his 
vivid proper names, e. g., Rain-in-the-Face, Young-Man-Afraid-of- 
His-Wife and Voice-Like-Thunder. These names, and other word- 
phrases like them, made an instant appeal to American humor, and 
were extensively imitated in popular slang. One of the surviving 



104 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


coinages of that era is Old-Stick-in-the-Mud, which Farmer and 
Henley note as having reached England by 1823. 

Contact with the French in Louisiana and along the Canadian 
border, and with the Spanish in Texas and further West, brought 
many more new words. From the Canadian French, as we have 
already seen, prairie, batteau, portage and rapids had been borrowed 
during colonial days. To these French contributions bayou, pica¬ 
yune, levee, chute, butte, crevasse and lagniappe were now added, 
and probably also shanty and canuck. The use of brave to designate 
an Indian warrior, almost universal until the close of the Indian wars, 
was also of French origin. From the Spanish, once the Mississippi 
was crossed, and particularly after the Mexican war, there came a 
swarm of novelties, many of which have remained firmly imbedded 
in the language. Ajnong them were numerous names of strange 
objects: lariat, lasso, ranch, loco (weed), mustang, sombrero, canyon, 
desperado, poncho, chaparral, corral, bronco, plaza, peon, cayuse, 
burro, mesa, tornado, presidio, sierra and adobe. To them, as soon 
as gold was discovered, were added bonanza, eldorado, placer and 
vigilante. Cinch was borrowed from the Spanish cincha in the early 
Texas days, though its figurative use did not come in until much 
later. Ante, the poker term, though the etymologists point out its 
obvious origin in the Latin, probably came into American from the 
Spanish. Thornton’s first example of its use in its current sense is 
dated 1857, but Bartlett reported it in the form of anti in 1848. 
Coyote came from the Mexican dialect of Spanish; its first parent 
was the Aztec coyotl. Tamale had a similar origin, and so did 
frijole and tomato. None of these is good Spanish. 32 As usual, 
derivatives quickly followed the new-comers, among them peonage, 
bronco-buster, hot-tamale, ranchman and ranch-house, and such 
verbs as to ranch, to lasso, to corral, to ante up and to cinch. To 
vamose (from the Spanish vamos, let us go), came in at the same 
time. So did sabe. So did gazabo in the American sense. 

This was also the period of the first great immigrations, and the 
American people now came into contact, on a large scale, with peoples 

“Many such words are listed in Felix Ramos y Duarte’s Diccionario de 
Mejicanismos, 2nd ed., Mexico City, 1898; and in Miguel de Toro y Gisbert’s 
Americanismos; Paris, n. d. 



THE PERIOD OF GROWTH 


105 


of divergent race, particularly Germans, Irish Catholics from the 
South of Ireland (the Irish of colonial days “were descendants of 
Cromwell’s army, and came from the North of Ireland”), 33 and, on 
the Pacific Coast, Chinese. So early as the 20’s the immigration to 
the United States reached 25,000 in a year; in 1824 the Legislature 
of New York, in alarm, passed a restrictive act. 34 The Know-Nothing 
movement of the 50’s need not concern us here. Suffice it to recall 
that the immigration of 1845 passed the 100,000 mark, and that 
that of 1854 came within sight of 500,000. These new Americans, 
most of them Germans and Irish, did not all remain in the East; 
a great many spread through the West and Southwest with the other 
pioneers. Their effect upon the language was a great deal more pro¬ 
found than most of us think. The Irish, speaking the English of 
Cromwell’s time, greatly reinforced its usages in the United States, 
where it was beginning to yield to the schoolmasters, who were in¬ 
clined to follow contemporary English precept and practice. “The 
influence of Irish-English,” writes an English correspondent, “is still 
plainly visible all over the United States. About nine years ago, 
before I had seen America, a relative of mine came home after twelve 
years’ farming in North Dakota, and I was struck by the resemblance 
between his speech and that of the Irish drovers who brought cattle 
to Norwich market.” 35 We shall see various indications of the Irish 
influence later on, not only on the vocabulary, but also upon pronun- 

33 Prescott F. Hall: Immigration. . . .; New York, 1913, p. 5. Even in 
colonial days there were more such non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants than is com¬ 
monly assumed. Says Frederick J. Turner, in The Frontier in American 
History, pp. 22, 23: “The Scotch-Irish and the Palatine Germans, or Penn¬ 
sylvania Dutch, furnished the dominant element in the stock of the colonial 
frontier. . . . Such examples teach us to beware of misinterpreting the fact 
that there is a common English speech in America into the belief that the 
stock is also English.” 

84 Most of the provisions of this act, however, were later declared unconstitu¬ 
tional. Several subsequent acts met the same fate. 

35 This same correspondent adds: “I find very little trace of Scotch on this 
continent. One might expect to find it in Toronto, the Presbyterian Lhassa, 
where slot machines are removed from the streets on Sunday, but the speech 
of Toronto is actually not distinguishable from that of Buffalo. That is to 
say, it is quite Irish. The Scotch are not tenacious of their dialect, in spite 
of the fuss they make about it. It disappears in the second generation. I 
have met Prince Edward Islanders who speak Gaelic and American, but not 
Scotch. The affinity between Scotch and French, by the way, is noticeable 
nowhere more than in the Province of Quebec, where I have met Macdonalds 
who couldn’t speak English. The Scotch surrender their speech customs more 
readily than the English, and the Irish, it seems to me, are most tenacious of 
all.” 



106 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


ciation and idiom. The Germans also left indelible marks upon 
American, and particularly upon the spoken American of the common 
people. The everyday vocabulary is full of German words. 
Sauerkraut and noodle, as we have seen, came in during the colonial 
period, apparently through the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch, i. e., 
a mixture, much debased, of the German dialects of Switzerland, 
Suabia and the Palatinate. The later immigrants contributed 
'pretzel, pumpernickel, hausfrau, lager-beer, pinocle, wienerwurst 
(often reduced to wiener or wienie), frankfurter, bock-beer, schnitzel, 
leberwurst (sometimes half translated as liverwurst), blutwwrst, 
rathskeller, schweizer (cheese), delicatessen, hamburger (i. e., steak), 
kindergarten and katzenjammer 36 From them, in all probability, 
there also came two very familiar Americanisms, loafer and bum. 
The former, according to the Standard Dictionary, is derived from 
the German laufen; another authority says that it originated in a 
German mispronunciation of lover, i. e., as lofer 31 Thornton shows 
that the word was already in common use in 1835. Bum was origi¬ 
nally bummer, and apparently derives from the German bummler 38 
Both words have produced derivatives: loaf (noun), to loaf, comer- 

86 The majority of these words, it will be noted, relate to eating and drink¬ 
ing. They mirror the profound effect of German immigration upon American 
drinking habits and the American cuisine. In July, 1921, despite the current 
prejudice against all things German, I found sour-braten on the bill-of-fare at 
Delmonico’s in New York, and, more surprising still, “braten with potato- 
salad.” It is a fact often observed that loan-words, at least in modern times, 
seldom represent the higher aspirations of the creditor nation. French and 
German have borrowed from English, not words of lofty significance, but such 
terms as beefsteak, roast-beef, pudding, grog, jockey, tourist, sport, five-o’clook 
tea, cocktail and sweepstakes, and from American such terms as tango, fox¬ 
trot, one-step and canoe (often spelled kanu) . “The contributions of England 
to European civilization, as tested by the English words in Continental lan¬ 
guages,” says L. P. Smith, “are not, generally, of a kind to cause much na¬ 
tional self-congratulation.” See also The English Element in Foreign Lan¬ 
guage, by the same author, in English, March, 1919, p. 15 et seq. Nor would 
a German, I daresay, be very proud of the German contributions to American. 

87 Vide a paragraph in Notes and Queries, quoted by Thornton. 

88 Thornton offers examples of this form ranging from 1856 to 1885. During 
the Civil War the word acquired the special meaning of looter. The Southern¬ 
ers thus applied it to Sherman’s men. Vide Southern Historical Society 
Papers, vol. xii, p. 428; Richmond, 1884. Here is a popular rhyme that sur¬ 
vived until the early 90’s: 

Isidor, psht, psht! 

Vatch de shtore, psht, psht! 

Vhile I ketch de bummer 

Vhat shtole de suit of clothes! 

Bummel-zug is common German slang for slow train. 


THE PERIOD OF GROWTH 


107 


loafer, common-loafer, to bum, bum (adj.) and bummery, not to 
mention on the bum. Loafer has migrated to England, but bum is 
still unknown there in the American sense. In England, indeed, 
bum is used to designate an unmentionable part of the body and is 
thus not employed in polite discourse. 

Another example of debased German is offered by the American 
Kriss Kringle. It is from Christkindlein, or Christkind'l, and prop¬ 
erly designates, of course, not the patron saint of Christmas, but the 
child in the manger. A German friend tells me that the form Kriss 
Kringle, which is that given in the Standard Dictionary, and the 
form Krishing’l, which is that most commonly used in the United 
States, are both quite unknown in Germany. Here, obviously, we 
have an example of a loan-word in decay. Whole phrases have gone 
through the same process, for example, nix come erous (from nichts 
kommt heraus ) and ’rous mit ’im (from heraus mit ihm ). These 
phrases, like wie geht’s and ganz gut, are familiar to practically all 
Americans, no matter how complete their ignorance of correct Ger¬ 
man. So are such slang phrases, obviously suggested by German, 
as ach Louie and on the Fritz. So is the use of dumb for stupid, 
a borrowing from the German dumm. Most of them know, too, the 
meaning of gesundlieit, hummel, seidel, wanderlust, stein, speck, 
mannerchor, schiitzenfest, sdngerfest, tum-verein, hoch, yodel, zwie¬ 
back and zwei (as in zwei bier). I have found snitz (=schnitz ) in 
Town Topics . 39 Prosit is in all American dictionaries. 40 Bower, 
as used in cards, is an Americanism derived from the German bauer, 
meaning the jack. The exclamation, ouch! is classed as an Ameri¬ 
canism by Thornton, and he gives an example dated 1837. The New 
English Dictionary refers it to the German autsch, and Thornton 
says that “it may have come across with the Dunkers or the Mennon- 
ites.” Ouch is not heard in English, save in the sense of a clasp or 
buckle set with precious stones (=OF nouche), and even in that 
sense it is archaic. Shyster is very probably German also; Thornton 

38 Jan. 24, 1918, p. 4. 

40 Nevertheless, when I once put it into a night-letter a Western Union office 
refused to accept it, the rules requiring all night-letters to be in “plain Eng¬ 
lish.” Meanwhile, the English have borrowed it from American, and it is 
actually in the Oxford Dictionary. It is German student Latin. 


108 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


has traced it back to the 50’s. 41 Rum-dumb is grounded upon the 
meaning of dumb borrowed from the German; it is not listed in the 
English slang dictionaries. 42 Bristed says that the American mean¬ 
ing of wagon, which indicates almost any four-wheeled, horse-drawn 
vehicle in this country but only the very heaviest in England, was 
probably influenced by the German wagen. He also says that the 
American use of hold on for stop was suggested by the German halt 
an, and White says that the substitution of standpoint for point of 
view, long opposed by all purists, was first made by an American 
professor w T ho sought “an Anglicized form” of the German stand- 
punkt. The same German influence may be behind the general 
facility with which American forms compound nouns. In most other 
languages, for example, Latin and French, the process is rare, and 
even English lags far behind American. But in German it is almost 
unrestricted. “It is,” says L. P. Smith, “a great step in advance 
toward that ideal language in which meaning is expressed, not by 
terminations, but by the simple method of word position.” 

The immigrants from the South of Ireland, during the period 
under review, exerted an influence upon the language that was vastly 
greater than that of the Germans, both directly and indirectly, but 
their contributions to the actual vocabulary were probably less. They 
gave American, indeed, relatively few new words; perhaps shillelah, 
colleen, spalpeen, smithereens and poteen exhaust the unmistakably 
Gaelic list. Lallapalooza is also probably an Irish loan-word, though 
it is not Gaelic. It apparently comes from allay-foozee, a Mayo 
provincialism, signifying a sturdy fellow. Allay-foozee, in its turn, 
comes from the French allez-fusil, meaning “Forward the mus¬ 
kets!”—a memory, according to P. W. Joyce, 43 of the French landing 

"The word is not in the Oxford Dictionary, but Cassell gives it and says 
that it is German and an Americanism. The Standard Dictionary does not 
give its etymology. Thornton’s first example, dated 1856, shows a variant 
spelling, shuyster, thus indicating that it was then recent. All subsequent 
examples show the present spelling. It is to be noted that the suffix -ster is 
not uncommon in English, and that it usually carries a deprecatory significance. 

° Dumb-head, obviously from the German dummkopf, appears in a list of 
Kansas words collected by Judge J. C. Ruppenthal, of Russell, Kansas. (Dialeot 
Notes, vol. iv, pt. v, 1916, p. 322.) It is also noted in Nebraska and the Western 
Reserve, and is very common in Pennsylvania. TJhrgueker (■= uhr-gucken) is 
also on the Kansas list of Judge Ruppenthal. 

48 English As We Speak It in Ireland, 2nd ed.; London and Dublin, 1910, 
pp. 179-180. 


THE PERIOD OF GROWTH 


109 


at Killala in 1798. Sucli phrases as Erin go bragh and such exple¬ 
tives as begob and begorry may perhaps be added: they have got into 
American, though they are surely not distinctive Americanisms. 
But of far more importance, in the days of the great immigrations, 
than these few contributions to the vocabulary were certain speech 
habits that the Irish brought with them—habits of pronunciation, 
of syntax and even of grammar. These habits were, in part, the fruit 
of efforts to translate the idioms of Gaelic into English, and in part, 
as we have seen, survivals from the English of the age of James I. 
The latter, preserved by Irish conservatism in speech 44 came into 
contact in America with habits surviving, with more or less change, 
from the same time, and so gave those Aunerican habits an unmis¬ 
takable reinforcement. The Yankees had lived down such Jacobean 
pronunciations as tay for tea and desave for deceive, and these forms, 
on Irish lips, struck them as uncouth and absurd, but they still cling, 
in their common speech, to such forms as h’ist for hoist, bile for boil, 
chaw for chew, jine for join , 45 sass for sauce, heighth for height, 
rench for rinse and lep for leaped, and the employment of precisely 
the same forms by the thousands of Irish immigrants who spread 
through the country undoubtedly gave them support, and so protected 
them, in a measure, from the assault of the purists. And the same 
support was given to drownded for drowned, oncet for once, ketch 
for catch, ag’in for against and onery for ordinary. Grandgent shows 
that the so-called Irish oi-sound in jine and bile was still regarded 
as correct in the United States so late as 1822, though certain New 
England grammarians, eager to establish the more recent English 
usage, had protested against it before the end of the eighteenth 

44 “Our people,” says Dr. Joyce, “are very conservative in retaining old cus¬ 
toms and forms of speech. Many words accordingly that are discarded as 
old-fashioned—or dead and gone—in England, are still flourishing—alive and 
well, in Ireland. [They represent] . . . the classical English of Shakespeare’s 
time.” Pp. 6-7. 

45 Pope rhymed join with mine, divine and line; Dryden and Gray rhymed toil 
with smile. William Kenrick, in 1773, seems to have been the first English lexi¬ 
cographer to denounce this pronunciation. Tay survived in England until the 
second half of the eighteenth century. Then it fell into disrepute, and certain 
purists, among them Lord Chesterfield, attempted to change the ea-sound to 
ee in all words, including even great. Cf. the remarks under boil in A Desk- 
Book of Twenty-five Thousand Words Frequently Mispronounced, by Frank H. 
Vizetelly; New York, 1917. Also, The Standard of Pronunciation in English, 
by T. S. Lounsbury; New York, 1904, pp. 98-103. 




110 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


century. 46 The Irish who came in in the 30’s joined the populace 
in the war upon the reform, and to this day some of the old forms 
survive. Certainly it would sound strange to hear an Amierican 
farmer command his mare to hoist her hoof; he would invariably use 
hist, just as he would use rench for rinse. 

Certain usages of Gaelic, carried over into the English of Ireland, 
fell upon fertile soil in America. One was the employment of the 
definite article before nouns, as in French and German. An Irish¬ 
man does not say “I am good at Latin,” but “I am good at the Latin.” 
In the same way an American does not say “I had measles,” but 
“I had the measles.” There is, again, the use of the prefix a before 
various adjectives and gerunds, as in a-going and a-riding. This 
usage, of course, is native to English, as aboard and afoot demon¬ 
strate, but it is much more common in the Irish dialect, on account 
of the influence of the parallel Gaelic form, as in arn-aice=a-near, 
and it is also much more common in American. There is, yet again, 
a use of intensifying suffixes, often set down as characteristically 
American, which was probably borrowed from the Irish. Examples 
are no-siree and yes-indeedy, and the later hiddo and skiddoo. As 
Joyce shows, such suffixes, in Irish-English, tend to become whole 
phrases. The Irishman is almost incapable of saying plain yes or 
no; he must always add some extra and gratuitous asseveration. 47 
The American is in like case. His speech bristles with intensives; 
bet your life, not on your life, well I guess, and no mistake, and so on. 
The Irish extravagance of speech struck a responsive chord in the 
American heart. The American borrowed, not only occasional words, 
but whole phrases, and some of them have become thoroughly natural¬ 
ized. Joyce, indeed, shows the Irish origin of scores of locutions 
that are now often mistaken for native Americanisms, for example, 
great shakes, dead (as an intensive), thank you kindly, to split one's 
sides (i. e., laughing), and the tune the old cow died of, not to 
mention many familiar similes and proverbs. Certain Irish pronun¬ 
ciations, Gaelic rather than archaic English, got into American 

** Old and New, p. 127. 

" Amusing examples are to be found in Donlevy’s Irish Catechism. To the 
question, “Is the Son God?” the answer is not simply “Yes,” but “Yes, certainly 
He is.” And to the question, “Will God reward the good and punish the 
wicked ?” the answer is “Certainly; there is no doubt He will.” 


THE PERIOD OF GROWTH 


111 


during the nineteenth century. Among them, one recalls bhoy, 
which entered our political slang in the middle 40’s and survived 
into our own time. Again, there is the very characteristic American 
word ballyhoo, signifying the harangue of a ballyhoo-man, or 
spieler 48 (that is, barker) before a cheap show, or, by metaphor, any 
noisy speech. It is from Ballyhooly, the name of a village in Cork, 
once notorious for its brawls. Finally, there is shebang. Scheie 
de Vere derives it from the French cabane, but it seems rather more 
likely that it is from the Irish shebeen. 

The propagation of Irishisms in the United States was helped, 
during many years, by the enormous popularity of various dramas 
of Irish peasant life, particularly those of Dion Boucicault. So 
recently as 1910 an investigation made by the Dramatic Mirror 
showed that some of his pieces, notably “Mavourneen,” “The Colleen 
Bawn” and “The Shaugraun,” were still among the favorites of 
popular audiences. Irish plays of that sort, at one time, were pre¬ 
sented by dozens of companies, and a number of actors, among them 
Andrew Mack, William J. Scanlon, Joe Murphy, Chauncey Olcott 
and Boucicault himself, made fortunes appearing in them. An influ¬ 
ence also to be taken into account is that of Irish songs, once in great 
vogue. But such influences, like the larger matter of American bor¬ 
rowings from Anglo-Irish, remain to be investigated. So far as I 
have been able to discover, there is not a single article in print 
upon the subject. Here, as elsewhere, our philologists have wholly 
neglected a very interesting field of inquiry. 

From other languages the borrowings during the period of growth 
were naturally less. Down to the last decades of the nineteenth cen¬ 
tury, the overwhelming majority of immigrants were either Germans 
or Irish; the Jews, Italians, Scandinavians, and Slavs were yet to 
come. But the first Chinese appeared in 1848, and soon their speech 
began to contribute its inevitable loan-words. These words, of course, 
were first adopted by the miners of the Pacific Coast, and a great 
many of them have remained California localisms, among them such 
verbs as to yen (to desire strongly, as a Chinaman desires opium) 
and to flop-flop (to lie down), and such nouns as fun, a measure of 
weight. But a number of others have got into the common speech of 
48 Spieler, of course, is from the German spiel. 



112 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


the whole country, e. g., favrtan, kow-tow, chop-suey, ginseng, joss, 
yok-ewmi and tong. Contrary to the popular opinion, dope and hop 
are not from the Chinese. Neither, in fact, is an Americanism, 
though the former has one meaning that is specially American, i. e., 
that of information or formula, as in racing-dope and to dope out. 
Most etymologists derive the word from the Dutch doop, a sauce. 
In English, as in American, it signifies a thick liquid, and hence the 
viscous cooked opium. Hop is simply the common name of the 
Humulus lupulus. The belief that hops have a soporific effect is very 
ancient, and hop-pillows were brought to America by the first English 
colonists. 

The derivation of poker, which came into American from Cali¬ 
fornia in the days of the gold rush, has puzzled etymologists. It is 
commonly derived from primero, the name of a somewhat similar 
game, popular in England in the sixteenth century, but the relation 
seems rather fanciful. It may possibly come, indirectly, from the 
Danish word pokker, signifying the devil. Pokerish, in the sense 
of alarming, was a common adjective in the United States before 
the Civil War; Thornton gives an example dated 1827. Scheie de 
Yere says that poker, in the sense of a hobgoblin, was still in use in 
1871, but he derives the name of the game from the Erench poche 
( = pouche, pocket). He seems to believe that the bank or pool, in 
the early days, was called the poke. Barrere and Leland, rejecting 
all these guesses, derive poker from the Yiddish pochger, which comes 
in turn from the verb pochgen, signifying to conceal winnings or 
losses. This pochgen is probably related to the German pocher 
(=boaster, braggart). There were a good many German Jews in 
California in the early days, and they were ardent gamblers. If 
Barrere and Leland are correct, then poker enjoys the honor of being 
the first loan-word taken into American from the Yiddish. But more 
likely it is from the German direct. “There is a little-known German 
card game,” says a correspondent, “which goes by the name of poch. 
It resembles poker in a number of ways. Its name is derived from 
the fact that at one stage of the game the players in turn declare the 
state of their hands by either passing or opening. Those who pass, 
signify it by saying, Tch poche / or ‘Ich poch.’ This is sometimes 



THE PERIOD OF GROWTH 


113 


indicated realistically by knocking on the table with one’s knuckles.” 
I leave the problem to the etymologists of the future. 


5 . 

Pronunciation Before the Civil War 

Noah Webster, as we saw in the last chapter, sneered at the broad 
a, in 1789, as an Anglomaniac aifectation. In the course of the next 
25 years, however, he seems to have suffered a radical change of mind, 
for in “The American Spelling Book,” published in 1817, he or¬ 
dained it in ash, last, mass, aunt, grass, glass and their analogues, 
and in his 1829 revision he clung to this pronunciation, besides add¬ 
ing master, pastor, amass, quaff, laugh, craft, etc., and even massive. 
His authority was sufficient to safeguard the broad a in the speech 
of New England, and it has remained there ever since, though often 
showing considerable variations from the true English a. Between 
1830 and 1850, according to Grandgent, 49 it ran riot through the 
speech of the region, and was even introduced into such words as 
handsome, matter, apple, caterpillar, pantry, hammer, practical and 
satisfaction. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in 1857, protested against it 
in “The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table,” but the great majority 
of New England schoolmasters were with Webster, and so the pro¬ 
test went for naught. There is some difficulty, at this distance, 
about determining just what sound the great lexicographer advo¬ 
cated. His rival, Worcester, in 1830, recommended a sound inter¬ 
mediate between ah and the flat a. “To pronounce the words fast, 
last, glass, grass, dance, etc.,” he said, “with the proper sound of 
short a, as in hat, has the appearance of affectation; and to 
pronounce them with the full Italian sound of a, as in part, 
father, seems to border on vulgarism.” Grandgent says that 
this compromise a never made much actual progress—that the 
New Englanders preferred the “Italian a” recommended by Webster, 
whatever it was. Apparently it was much nearer to the a in father 

*01(1 and New, p. 139. The two essays in this book, Fashion and the Broad 
A, and New England Pronunciation, contain the best discussion of the subject 
that I have ever encountered. 


ii4 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


than to the a in all. A quarter of a century after Webster’s death, 
Richard Grant White distinguished clearly between these a s, and 
denounced the former as “a British peculiarity.” Frank H. 
Yizetelly, writing in 1917, still noted the difference, particularly in 
such words as daunt, saunter and laundry; some Americans, pro¬ 
nouncing these words, use one a, and some use the other. At the 
present time, says Grandgent, “the broad a of New Englanders, 
Italianate though it be, is not so broad as that of Old England. . . . 
Our grass really lies between the grabs of a British lawn and the grass 
of the boundless prairies.” In the cities, he adds, it has been “shaken 
by contact with the Irish,” and is now restricted to “a few specific 
classes of words—especially those in which an a (sometimes an au ) 
is followed by a final r, by an r that precedes another consonant, by 
an m written Im, or by the sound of f, s, or th: as far, hard, halm, 
laugh, pass, rather, path. In the first two categories, and in the word 
father, ah possesses nearly all the English-speaking territory; con¬ 
cerning the other classes there is a wide divergence, although flat a 
appears everywhere to be disappearing from words like halm. 
Yankeedom itself is divided over such combinations as ant, cant, 
dance, example, in which a nasal and another consonant follow the 
vowel; aunt, however, always has broad a. Ah, in this region, is best 
preserved in rural communities and among people of fashion, the 
latter being more or less under British influence.” 

But the imprimatur of the Yankee Johnson was not potent enough 
to establish the broad a outside New England. He himself, compro¬ 
mising in his old age, allowed the flat a in stamp and vase. His suc¬ 
cessor and rival, Lyman Cobb, decided for it in pass, draft, and dance, 
though he advocated the aA-sound in laugh, path, daunt and saunter. 
By 1850 the flat a was dominant everywhere west of the Berkshires 
and south of New Hjaven, save for what Grandgent calls “a little 
ah -spot in Virginia,” and its sound had even got into such proper 
names as Alabama and Lafayette . 50 “In the United States beyond 
the Hudson—perhaps beyond the Connecticut,” says Grandgent, 
“the flat a prevails before f, s, th, and n.” 

Webster failed in a number of his other attempts to influence 

“Richard Meade Bache denounced it, in Lafayette, during the 60’s. Tide his 
Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech, 2nd ed., Philadelphia, 1869, p. 65. 


THE PERIOD OF GROWTH 


115 


American pronunciation. His advocacy of deef for deaf had popular 
support while he lived, and he dredged up authority for it out of 
Chaucer and Sir William Temple, but the present pronunciation 
gradually prevailed, though deef remains familiar in the common 
speech. Joseph E. Worcester and other rival lexicographers stood 
against many of his pronunciations, and he took the field against 
them in the prefaces to the successive editions of his spelling-books. 
Thus, in that to ‘‘The Elementary Spelling Book,” dated 1829, he 
denounced the “affectation” of inserting a y-sound before the u in 
such words as gradual and nature, with its compensatory change of d 
into dj and of t into ch. The English lexicographer, John Walker, 
had argued for this “affectation” in 1791, but Webster’s prestige, 
while he lived, remained so high in some quarters that he carried 
the day, and the older professors at Yale, it is said, continued to use 
natur down to 1839. He favored the pronunciation of either and 
neither as ee-ther and nee-ther, and so did most of the English au¬ 
thorities of his time. The original pronunciation of the first syllable, 
in England, probably made it rhyme with hay, but the ee-sound was 
firmly established by the end of the eighteenth century. Toward the 
middle of the following century, however, there arose a fashion of an 
GM-sound, and this affectation was borrowed by certain Americans. 
Gould, in the 50’s, put the question, “Why do you say i-ther and 
ni-ther?” to various Americans. The reply he got was: “The words 
are so pronounced by the best-educated people in England.” This 
imitation still prevails in the cities of the East. “All of us,” says 
Lounsbury, “are privileged in these latter days frequently to witness 
painful struggles put forth to give to the first syllable of these words 
the sound of i by those who who have been brought up to give it the 
sound of e. There is apparently an impression on the part of some 
that such a pronunciation establishes on a firm foundation an other¬ 
wise doubtful social standing.” 51 But the overwhelming majority 
of Americans continue to say ee-ther and not eye- ther. White and 
Vizetelly, like Lounsbury, argue that they are quite correct in so 
doing. The use of eye- ther, says White, is no more than “a copy 
of a second-rate British affectation.” 

“The Standard of Pronunciation in English, pp. 109-112. 


IV. 

AMERICAN" AND ENGLISH TODAY 

1 . 

The Two Vocabularies 

By way of preliminary to an examination of the American of 
today, here is a list of terms in everyday use that differ in American 
and English: 


American 

ash-can 

ash-cart 

ashman 

backyard 

baggage 

baggage-car 

ballast (railroad) 

barbershop 

bath-robe 

bath-tub 

beet 

bid (on a contract) 
bill-board 

boardwalk (seaside) 
boot 

brakeman 
breakfast-food 
bumper (car) 
calendar (court) 
campaign (political) 
can (noun) 
candy 
cane 

canned-goods 

car (railroad) 

carom (billiards) 

checkers (game) 

cheese-cloth 

chicken-yard 

chief-of-police 

city-editor 

city-ordinance 

clipping (newspaper) 


English 

dust-bin 

dust-cart 

dustman 

garden 

luggage 

luggage-van 

metal 

barber’s-shop 

dressing-gown 

bath 

beet-root 

tender 

hoarding 

promenade 

high-boot 

brakesman 

porridge 

buffer 

cause-list 

canvass 

tin 

sweets 

stick 

tinned-goods 

carriage, van or waggon 
cannon 
draughts 
butter-muslin 
fowl-run 
chief-con stable 
chief-reporter 
by-law 
cutting 
116 


AMERICAN AND ENGLISH TODAY 


117 


American 

closed-season 

coal 

coal-oil 

collar-button 

commission-merchant 

commutation-ticket 

conductor (of a train) 

corn 

corn-meal 

counterfeiter 

cow-catcher 

cracker 

crazy-bo*e 

cross-tie 

crystal (watch) 

daylight-time 

department-store 

derby (hat) 

dime-novel 

district (political) 

druggist 

drug-store 

drummer 

dry-goods-store 

editorial (noun) 

elevator 

elevator-boy 

enlisted-man 

express-train (subway) 

ferns 

filing-cabinet 

fire-department 

fish-dealer 

floor-walker 

fraternal-order 

freight 

freight-agent 

freight-car 

freight-elevator 

frog (railway) 

garters (men’s) 

gasoline 

grade (railroad) 
grain 

grain-broker 

groceries 

hardware-dealer 

headliner 

hod-carrier 

hog-pen 

hood (automobile) 

hospital (private) 

huckster 

hunting 

Indian 

Indian Summer 

instalment-business 

instalment-plan 


English 

close-season 

coals 

paraffin 

stud 

factor, or commission-agent 

season-ticket 

guard 

maize, or Indian corn 

Indian meal 

coiner 

plough 

biscuit 

funny-bone 

sleeper 

watch-glass 

summer-time 

stores 

bowler 

penny-dreadful 

division 

chemist 

chemist’s shop 

bagman 

draper’s-shop 

leader, or leading-article 

lift 

lift-man 

private-soldier 

non-stop-train 

bracken 

nest-of-drawers 

fire-brigade 

fishmonger 

shop-walker 

friendlv-society 

goods 

goods-manager 

goods-waggon 

hoist 

crossing-plate 

sock-suspenders 

petrol 

gradient 

corn 

corn-factor 

stores 

ironmonger 

topliner 

hodman 

Piggery 

bonnet 

nursing-home 

coster (monger) 

shooting 

Red Indian 

St. Martin’s Summer 

credit-trade 

hire-purchase plan 


118 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


American English 


internal-revenue 

inland-revenue 

janitor 

caretaker, or porter 

laborer 

navvy 

legal-holiday 

bank-holiday 

letter-box 

pillar-box 

letter-carrier 

postman 

locomotive engineer 

engine-driver 

long-distance-call 

trunk-call 

lumber 

deals 

lumber-yard 

timber-yard 

mad 

angry 

Methodist 

Wesleyan 

molasses 

treacle 

monkey-wrench 

spanner 

movies 

pictures (or films) 

necktie 

tie 

news-dealer 

news-agent 

newspaper-man 

pressman, or journalist 

notions 

small-wares 

officeholder 

public-servant 

orchestra (seats in a theatre) 

stalls 

outbuildings (farm) 

offices 

package 

parcel 

parcels-room 

left-luggage-room 

parlor 

drawing-room 

parlor-car 

saloon-carriage 

patrolman (police) 

constable 

peanut 

monkey-nut 

pen-point 

nib 

period (punctuation) 

full-stop 

pitcher 

jug 

poorhouse 

workhouse 

post-paid 

post-free 

potpie 

pie 

prepaid 

carriage-paid 

press (printing) 

machine 

program (of a meeting) 

agenda 

public-school 

board-school 

quotation-marks 

inverted-commas 

railroad 

railway 1 

railroad-man 

railway-servant 

rails 

line 

receipts (in business) 

takings 

Rhine-wine 

Hock 

road-bed (railroad) 

permanent-way 

road-repairer 

road-mender 

roast 

joint 

roll (of films) 

spool 

roll-call 

division 

rooster 

cock 

round-trip-ticket 

return-ticket 

saleswoman 

shop-assistant 

saloon 

public-house 


1 Railway, of course, is sometimes used in the United States. But all the 
English dictionaries call railroad an Americanism. In the Central West 
there seems to be a tendency to distinguish between railway, an interurban 
electric line, and railroad, a steam line. 


AMERICAN AND ENGLISH TODAY 


119 


American 

scow 

sewerage 

shirtwaist 

shoe 

shoemaker 

shoe-shine 

shoestring 

shoe-tree 

sick 

sidewalk 

sight-seeing-car 

silver (collectively) 

sled 

sleigh 

soft-drinks 

smoking-room 

spigot (or faucet) 

sponge (surgical) 

stem-winder 

stockholder 

stocks 

store-fixtures 

street-cleaner 

street-railway 

suspenders (men’s) 

switch (noun, railway) 

switch (verb, railway) 

taxes (municipal) 

taxpayer (local) 

tenderloin (of beef) 

ten-pins 

thumb-tack 

ticket-office 

tinner 

tin-roof 

track (railroad) 

trained-nurse 

transom (of door) 

trolley-car 

truck (vehicle) 

truck (of a railroad car) 

typewriter (operator) 

undershirt 

vaudeville-theatre 

vest 

warden (of a prison) 

warden (subordinate) 

wash-rag 

wash-stand 

waste-basket 

whippletree 

witness-stand 


English 

lighter 

drains 

blouse 

boot 

bootmaker 

boot-polish 

bootlace 

boot-tree 

ill 

footpath, or pavement 

char-h-banc 

plate 

sledge 

sledge 

minerals 

smoke-room 

tap 

wipe 

keyless-watch 

shareholder 

shares 

shop-fittings 

crossing-sweeper 

tramway 

braces 

points 

shunt 

rates 

ratepayer 

under-cut, or fillet 

nine-pins 

drawing-pin 

booking-office 

tinker 

leads 

line 

hospital-nurse 

fanlight 

tramcar 

lorry 

bogie 

typist 

vest 

music-hall 

waistcoat 

governor 

warder 

face-cloth 

wash-hand-stand 

waste-paper-basket 

splinter-bar 

witness-box 


120 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


2 . 

Differences in Usage 

The differences here listed, most of them between words in every¬ 
day employment, are but examples of a divergence in usage which 
extends to every department of daily life. In his business, in his 
journeys from his home to his offiee, in his dealings with his family 
and servants, in his sports and amusements, in his politics and even 
in his religion the American uses, not only words and phrases, but 
whole syntactical constructions, that are unintelligible to the Eng¬ 
lishman, or intelligible only after laborious consideration. A familiar 
anecdote offers an example in miniature. It concerns a young Ameri¬ 
can woman living in a region of prolific orchards who is asked by a 
visiting Englishman what the residents do with so much fruit. Her 
reply is a pun: “We eat all we can, and what we can’t we can.” 
This answer would mystify most Englishmen, for in the first place it 
involves the use of the flat American a in can't and in the second 
place it applies an unfamiliar name to the vessel that the Englishman 
knows as a tin, and then adds to the confusion by deriving a verb 
from the substantive. There are no such things as canned-goods in 
England; over there they are tinned. The can that holds them is a 
tin; to can them is to tin them. . . . And they are counted, not as 
groceries, but as stores, and advertised, not on bill-boards but on 
hoardings. And the cook who prepares them for the table is not Nora 
or Maggie, but Cook, and if she does other work in addition she is 
not a girl for general housework, but a cook-general, and not help, 
but a servant. And the boarder who eats them is sometimes not a 
boarder at all, but a paying-guest. And the grave of the tin, once it 
is emptied, is not the ash-can, but the dust-bin, and the man who 
carries it away is not the garbage-man or the ash-man or the white- 
wings, but the dustman. 

An Englishman, entering his home, does not walk in upon the 
first floor, but upon the ground floor. What he calls the first floor 
(or, more commonly, first storey, not forgetting the penultimate e!) 
is what we call the second floor, and so on up to the roof—which is 
covered not with tin, but with slate, tiles or leads. He does not take 


AMERICAN AND ENGLISH TODAY 


121 


a paper; he takes in a paper. He does not ask his servant, “Is there 
any mail for me ?” but “Are there any letters for me ?” for mail, in 
the American sense, is a word that he seldom uses, save in such 
compounds as mail-van, mail-train and mail-order. He always speaks 
of it as the post. The man who brings it is not a letter-carrier but a 
postman. It is posted, not mailed, at a pillar-box, not at a mail-box. 
The Englishman dictates his answers, not to a typewriter , but to a 
typist; a typewriter is merely the machine. If he desires the 
recipient to call him by telephone he doesn’t say, “ ’phone me at a 
quarter of eight,” but “ring me up (or, sometimes, of late, ’phone 
me) at a quarter to eight.” And when the call comes he says 
“are you there ?” When he gets home, he doesn’t find his wife wait¬ 
ing for him in the parlor or living-room, 2 but in the drawing-room 
or in her sitting-room. He doesn’t bring her a box of candy, but 
a box of sweets. He doesn’t leave a derby hat in the hall, but a 
bowler. His wife doesn’t wear shirtwaists, but blouses. When she 
buys one she doesn’t say “charge it,” but “put it down.” When she 
orders a tailor-made suit, she calls it a costume or a coat-and-skirt. 
When she wants a spool of thread she asks for a reel of cotton . 3 
Such things are bought, not in the department-stores, but at the 
stores, which are substantially the same thing. In these stores 
calico means a plain cotton cloth; in the United States it means a 
printed cotton cloth. Things bought on the instalment plan in 
England are usually said to be bought on the hire-purchase plan 
or system; the instalment business itself is the credit-trade. Goods 
ordered by post (not mail ) on which the dealer pays the cost of 
transportation are said to be sent, not postpaid or prepaid, but post- 
free or carriage-paid. 

An Englishman does not wear suspenders, but braces. Suspenders 
are his wife’s garters; his own are sock-suspenders. The family does 
not seek sustenance in a tenderloin but in an undercut or fillet. 
It does not eat beets, but beet-roots. The wine on the table, if 
white and German, is not Rhine wine, but Hock. Yellow 
turnips, in England, are called Swedes, and are regarded as fit food 

*It is possible that the American living-room was suggested by the German 
wohnzimmer. 

8 Spool of thread is Irish. 


122 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


for cattle only; when rations were short there, in 1916, the Saturday 
Review made a solemn effort to convince its readers that they were 
good enough to go upon the table. The English, of late, have learned 
to eat another vegetable formerly resigned to the lower fauna, to wit, 
American sweet corn. But they are still having some difficulty 
about its name, for plain com in England, as we have seen, means all 
the grains used by man. Some time ago, in the Sketch-, one C. J. 
Clive, a gentleman farmer of Worcestershire, was advertising sweet 
comrcobs as the “most delicious of all vegetables,” and offering to 
sell them at 6s. 6d. a dozen, carriage-paid. Chicory is something 
else that the English are unfamiliar with; they always call it endive. 
By chicken they mean any fowl, however ancient. Broilers and 
friers are never heard of over there. [Neither are crawfish, which 
are always crayfish . 4 The classes which, in America, eat breakfast, 
dinner and supper, have breakfast, dinner and tea in England; 
supper always means a meal eaten late in the evening. The Ameri¬ 
can use of lunch to designate any irregular meal, even at midnight, 
is unknown in England. An Englishwoman’s maid, if she 
has one, is not Ethel or Maggie but Robinson, and the nurse¬ 
maid who looks after her children is not Lizzie but Nurse. 5 
So, by the way, is a trained nurse in a hospital, whose full style is 
not Miss J ones, hut Nurse J ones or Sister. And the hospital itself, 
if private, is not a hospital at all, hut a nursing-home, and its trained 
nurses are plain nurses, or hospital nurses, or maybe nursing sisters. 
And the white-clad young gentlemen who make love to them are not 
studying medicine but walking the hospitals. Similarly, an English 
law student does not study law, but reads the law. 

If an English boy goes to a public school, it is not a sign that he 
is getting his education free, but that his father is paying a good 
round sum for it and is accepted as a gentleman. A public school 
over there corresponds to our prep school; it is a place maintained 
chiefly by endowments, wherein boys of the upper classes are pre- 

4 The verb to craiofish, of course, is also unknown in England. 

'The differences between the nursery vocabulary in English and American 
deserve investigation, but are beyond the jurisdiction of a celibate inquirer. I 
have been told by an Englishman that English babies do not say choo-choo 
to designate a railroad train, but puff-puff. 


AMERICAN AND ENGLISH TODAY 


123 


pared for the universities. What we know as a public school is 
called a board school or council school in England, not because the 
pupils are hoarded but because it is managed by a school board or 
county council. The boys in a public ( i . e., private) school are 
divided, not into classes, or grades, but into forms, which are num¬ 
bered, the lowest being the first form. The benches they sit on are 
also called forms. An English boy whose father is unable to pay 
for his education goes first into a babies’ class (a kindergarten is 
always a private school) in a primary or infants’ school. He moves 
thence to class one, class two, class three and class four, and then 
into the junior school, where he enters the first standard. Until 
now boys and girls have sat together in class, but hereafter they 
are separated, the boy going to a boys’ school and the girl 
to a girls’. He goes up a standard a year. At the third or 
fourth standard, for the first time, he is put under a male 
teacher. He reaches the seventh standard, if he is bright, at 
the age of 12, and then goes into what is known as the ex-seventh. 
If he stays at school after this he goes into the ex-ex-seventh. But 
many leave the public elementary school at the ex-seventh and go 
into the secondary school, which is what Americans call a high- 
school. “The low T est class in a secondary school,” says an English 
correspondent, “is known as the third form. In this class the boy 
from the public elementary school meets boys from private prepara¬ 
tory schools, or prep-schools, who usually have an advantage over him, 
being armed with the Greek alphabet, the first twenty pages of 
‘French Without Tears,’ the fact that Balbus built a wall, and the 
fact that lines equal to the same line are equal to one another. But 
usually the public elementary school boy conquers these disabilities 
by the end of his first high-school year, and so wins a place in the 
upper fourth form,, while his wealthier competitors grovel in the 
lower fourth. In schools where the fagging system prevails the 
fourth is the lowest form that is fagged. The lower fifth is the 
retreat of the unscholarly. The sixth form is the highest. Those 
who fail in their matriculation for universities or who wish to 
study for the civil service or pupil teachers’ examinations go into 
a thing called the remove, which is less a class than a state of mind. 
Here are the Brahmins, the contemplative Olympians, the pre- 


124 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


fects, the lab. monitors.” The principal of an English public 
(i. e., private) school is a head-master or head-mistress, but 
in a council school he or she may be a principal. The lower peda¬ 
gogues used to be ushers, but are now assistant masters (or mis¬ 
tresses). The titular head of a university is a chancellor or rector . 6 
He is always some eminent public man, and a vice-chancellor or vice¬ 
rector performs his duties. The head of a mere college may be a 
president, principal, master, warden, rector, dean or provost. 

At the universities the students are not divided into freshmen, 
sophomores, juniors and seniors, as with us, but are simply first- 
year-men, second-year-men, and so on, though a first-year-man is 
sometimes a fresher. Such distinctions, however, are not as impor¬ 
tant in England as in America ; members of the university (they are 
usually called members, not students) do not flock together according 
to seniority, and there is no regulation forbidding an upper classman, 
or even a graduate, to be polite to a student just entered. An 
English university man does not study; he reads. He knows nothing 
of frats, class-days, senior-proms and such things; save at Cambridge 
and Dublin he does not even speak of a commencement. On the 
other hand his daily speech is full of terms unintelligible to an 
American student, for example, wrangler, tripos, head, pass-degree 
and don. 

The upkeep of council-schools in England comes out of the rates, 
which are local taxes levied upon householders. For that reason an 
English municipal taxpayer is called a ratepayer. The function¬ 
aries who collect and spend money are not office-holders, but public- 
servants. The head of the local police is not a chief of police, but a 
chief constable. The fire department is the fire brigade. The 
street-cleaner used to be and sometimes still is a crossing-sweeper. 7 
The parish poorhouse is a workhouse. If it is maintained by 

8 This title has been borrowed by some of the American universities, e. g., 
Chancellor Day of Syracuse. But the usual title remains president. On the 
Continent it is rector. 

7 However, the street-cleaner is beginning to appear in some of the English 
cities. He is commonly employed by the Urban Sanitary Authority, and so 
the letters “U.S.A.” appear upon his cart—a shock to visiting Americans. The 
old-time orossing-sweeper was a free lance. He had his pitch at a crossing, and 
kept it clean; his income came from the free-will offerings of passers-by. As 
the English cities grow cleaner and official street-cleaning departments are set 
up he tends to disappear. 


AMERICAN AND ENGLISH TODAY 


125 


two or more parishes jointly it becomes a union. A pauper 

who accepts its hospitality is said to be on the rates. A 

policeman is a bobby familiarly and a constable officially. He 
is commonly mentioned in the newspapers, not by his name, 

but as P. C. 6J/-3 A — i. e., Police Constable Ho. 643 of the A 

Division. The fire-laddie, the ward executive, the wardman, the 
roundsman, the strong-arm squad, the third-degree, and other such 
objects of American devotion are unknown in England. An Eng¬ 
lish saloon-keeper is officially a licensed victualler. His saloon is a 
public house, or, colloquially, a pub. He does not sell beer by the 
bucket or can or growler or schooner, but by the pint. He and his 
brethren, taken together, are the licensed trade. His back-room 
is a parlor. If he has a few upholstered benches in his place he 
usually calls it a lounge. He employs no bartenders. Barmaids 
do the work, with maybe a barman to help. 

The American language, as we have seen, has begun to take in 
the English boot and shop, and it is showing hospitality to head¬ 
master, haberdasher and week-end, but subaltern, civil servant, por¬ 
ridge, moor, draper, treacle, tram and mufti are still rather 
strangers in the United States, as bleachers, picayune, air-line, cam¬ 
pus, chore, stogie and hoodoo are in England. A subaltern is a 
commissioned officer in the army, under the rank of captain. A 
civil servant is a public servant in the national civil service; if he 
is of high rank, he is usually called a permanent official. Porridge, 
moor, scullery, draper, treacle and tram, though unfamiliar, still 
need no explanation. Mufti means ordinary male clothing; an 
army officer out of uniform (American: in cits, or in citizens 
clothes ) is said to be in mufti. To this officer a sack-suit or busi¬ 
ness-suit is a lounge-suit. He carries his clothes in a box. He 
does not ask for a round-trip ticket, but for a return ticket. If he 
proposes to go to the theatre he does not reserve or engage seats; he 
books them. If he sits down-stairs, it is not in the orchestra, but in 
stalls. If he likes vaudeville, he goes to a music-hall, where the head¬ 
liners are top-liners. If he has to stand in line, he does it, not in a 
line, but in a queue. If he goes to see a new play, he says that 
it has just been put up, not put on. 

In England a corporation is a public company or limited liability 



126 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


company. The term corporation, over there, is commonly applied 
only to the mayor, aldermen and sheriffs of a city, as in the Lon¬ 
don corporation. Am Englishman writes Ltd. after the name of a 
limited liability (what we would call incorporated) bank or trad¬ 
ing company, as we write Inc. He calls its president its chair¬ 
man or managing director. Its stockholders are its shareholders, 
and hold shares instead of stock in it. The place wherein such com¬ 
panies are floated and looted—the Wall Street of London—is called 
the City, with a capital C. Bankers, stock-jobbers, promoters, di¬ 
rectors and other such leaders of its business are called City men. 
The financial editor of a newspaper is its City editor. Government 
bonds are consols, or stocks, or the funds? To have money in the 
stocks is to own such bonds. An Englishman hasn’t a bank-account, 
but a banking-account. He draws cheques (not checks ), not on his 
bank but on the bankers? In England there is a rigid distinction 
between a broker and a stock-broker. A broker means, not only a 
dealer in securities, as in our Wall Street broker, but also “a person 
licensed to sell or appraise disdrained goods.” To have the brokers 10 
in the house means to be bankrupt, with one’s very household goods 
in the hands of one’s creditors. 

Tariff reform, in England, does not mean a movement toward 
free trade, but one toward protection. The word Government, 
meaning what we call the administration, is always capitalized and 
plural, e. g., “The Government are considering the advisability, 
etc.” Vestry, committee, council, ministry and even company are 
also plural, though sometimes not capitalized. A member of Parlia¬ 
ment does not run for re-election; he stands. He does not represent a 
district, but a division or constituency. He never makes a stumping 
trip, but always a speaking tour. When he looks after his fences he 
calls it nursing the constituency. At a political meeting (they are 
often rough in England) the bouncers are called stewards; the suf¬ 
fragettes used to delight in stabbing them with hatpins. A member 
of Parliament is not afflicted by the numerous bugaboos that menace 

8 This form survives in the American term city-stock, meaning the bonds of 
a municipality. But state and federal securities are always called bonds. 

*Cf. A Glossary of Colloquial Slang and Technical Terms in Use in the 
Stock Exchange and in the Money Market, by A. J. Wilson: London, 1895. 

10 Or bailiffs. 


AMERICAN AND ENGLISH TODAY 


127 


an American congressman. He knows nothing of lame ducks, pork 
barrels, gag-rule, junkets, pulls, gerrymanders, omnibus-bills, snakes, 
niggers in the woodpile, Salt river, crow, bosses, ward heelers, men 
higher up, silk-stockings, repeaters, steam-rollers, ballot-box stuffers 
and straight and split tickets (he always calls them ballots or voting 
papers ). He has never heard, save as a report of far-off heresies, of 
direct primaries, the recall, or the initiative and referendum. A roll- 
call in Parliament is a division. A member speaking is said to be up 
or on his legs. When the house adjourns it is said to rise. A member 
referring to another in the course of a debate does not say “the 
gentleman from Manchester,” but “the honorable gentleman” (writ¬ 
ten hon. gentleman ) or, if he happens to be a privy councillor, “the 
right honorable gentleman,” or, if he is a member of one of the 
universities or of one of the learned professions, “the honorable and 
learned gentleman,” or, if he is or has been a soldier or sailor, “the 
honorable and gallant gentleman.” If the speaker refers to a mem¬ 
ber of his own party he may say “my honorable friend.” 

In the United States a pressman is a man who runs a printing 
press; in England he is a newspaper reporter, or, as the English 
usually say, a journalist . 11 This journalist works, not at space 
rates, but at lineage rates. A printing press is a machine. An 
editorial in a newspaper is a leading article or leader. An editorial 
paragraph is a leaderette, or par. A newspaper clipping is a cutting. 
A pass to the theatre is an order. The room-clerk of a hotel is the 
secretary. A real-estate agent or dealer is an estate-agent. The 
English keep up most of the old distinctions between physicians and 
surgeons, barristers and solicitors. A barrister is greatly superior 
to a solicitor. He alone can address the higher courts and the 
parliamentary committees; a solicitor must keep to office work and 
the inferior courts. A man with a grievance goes first to his 
solicitor, who then instructs or briefs a barrister for him. If that 
barrister, in the course of the trial, wants certain evidence re¬ 
moved from the record, he moves that it be struck out, not stricken 

11 Until a few years ago no self-respecting American newspaper reporter 
would call himself a journalist. He always used newspaper man, and referred 
to his vocation, not as a profession, but as the newspaper business. This idiotic 
prejudice, however, now seems to he breaking down. Cf. Don’t Shy at Jour¬ 
nalist, The Editor and Publisher and Journalist , June 27, 1914. 


128 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


out, as an American lawyer would say. Only barristers may be¬ 
come judges. An English barrister, like his American brother, 
takes a retainer when he is engaged. But the rest of his fee does 
not wait upon the termination of the case: he expects and receives a 
refresher from time to time. A barrister is never admitted to the 
bar, but is always called. If he becomes a Kings Counsel, or K. C. 
(a purely honorary appointment), he is said to have taken silk. 
In the United States a lawyer tries a case and the judge either tries 
or hears it; in England the judge always tries it. In the United 
States the court hands down a decision; in England the court hands 
it out. In the United States a lawyer probates a will; in England 
he proves it, or has it admitted to probate. 

The common objects and phenomena of nature are often differ¬ 
ently named in England and America. As we saw in a previous 
chapter, such Americanisms as creek and run, for small streams, are 
practically unknown in England, and the English moor and downs 
early disappeared from American. The Englishman knows the 
meaning of sound (e. g., Long Island Sound), but he nearly always 
uses channel in place of it. In the same way the American knows 
the meaning of the English bog, but rejects the English distinction 
between it and swamp, and almost always uses swamp or 
marsh (often elided to mash). The Englishman, until lately, never 
described a severe storm as a hurricane, a cyclone, a tornado, or a 
blizzard. He never uses cold-snap, cloudburst or under the weather. 
He does not say that the temperature is 29 degrees (Fahrenheit) 
or that the thermometer or the mercury is at 29 degrees, but that 
there are three degrees of frost. He calls ice water iced-water. What 
we call the mining regions he knows as the black country. He never, 
of course, uses down-East or up-State. Many of our names for com¬ 
mon fauna and flora are unknown to him save as strange Ameri¬ 
canisms, e. g., terrapin, moose, June-bug, persimmon, gumbo, egg¬ 
plant, alfalfa, catnip, sweet-potato and yarn. He calls the rutabaga a 
mangelwurzel. He is familiar with many fish that we seldom see, 
e. g., the turbot. He also knows the hare, which is seldom heard of 
in America. But he knows nothing of devilled-crabs, crab-cocktails, 
seafood-dinners, clam-choivder or oyster-steivs, and he never goes to 
oyster-suppers, clam-bakes or bur goo-picnics. He doesn’t buy peanuts 



AMERICAN AND ENGLISH TODAY 


129 


when he goes to the circus. He calls them monkeynuts, and to 
eat them publicly is infra dig. The common American use of 
peanut as an adjective of disparagement, as in peanut politics, is 
incomprehensible to him. 

In England a hack is not a public coach, but a horse let out at 
hire, or one of similar quality. A life insurance policy is usually 
not an insurance policy at all, but an assurance policy. What we 
call the normal income tax is the ordinary tax; what we call the sur¬ 
tax is the supertax} 2 An Englishman never lives on a street, but 
always in it. 13 He never lives in a block of houses, but in a row; 
it is never in a section of the city, but always in a district. The 
business-blocks that are so proudly exhibited in all small American 
towns are quite unknown to him. He often calls an office-building 
(his are always small) simply a house, e. g., Carmelite House. 
Going home by train he always takes the down-train, no matter 
whether he be proceeding southward to Wimbledon, westward to 
Shepherd’s Bush, northward to Tottenham or eastward to Noak’s 
Hill. A train headed toward London is always an up-train, and the 
track it runs on is the up-line. Eastbound and westbound tracks 
and trains are unknown in England, and in general the Englishman 
has a much less keen sense of the points of the compass than the 
American. He knows the East End and the West End, but he never 
speaks of the north-east comer of two streets. Square, in England, 
always means a small park. A backyard is a garden, though a garden 
is not always a backyard. English streets have no sidewalks; they 
always call them pavements or foot-paths or simply paths. An auto¬ 
mobile is always a motor-car or motor. Auto is almost unknown, 
and with it to auto. So is machine. A road, in England, is al¬ 
ways a road, and never a railway. A spittoon is always a spittoon 
and never a cuspidor. The Englishman rides only on horses or on 
a bicycle; in carriages and motor-cars he always drives. He always 
wears goloshes; never arctics, rubbers, gumshoes or overshoes. A 
car, to him, always means a tram-car or motor-car; never a railway- 

u Cf. a speech of Senator La Follette, Congressional Record, Aug. 27, 1917, 
p. 6992. 

“Of late in has come into use in America, but only in relation to minor 
streets. Thus a man may be said to live in Sixty-first street, but his office is 
on Broadway. 


130 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


carriage. A telegraph-blank is always a telegraph-form. He never 
has his shoes (or boots) shined; he has them blacked. He washes 
his hands, not at a stationary wash-stand, but at a fixed-in basin. To 
him daylight-saving time is summer time, a parcels-room is a left- 
luggage room, and a legal-holiday is a bank-holiday. 

An Englishman always calls russet, yellow or tan shoes brown 
shoes (or, if they cover the ankle, boots). He calls a pocketbook a 
purse, and gives the name of pocketbook to what we call a memo¬ 
randum-book. His walking stick is always a stick, never a cane. By 
cord he means something strong, almost what we call twine; a thin 
cord he always calls a string; his twine is the lightest sort of string. 
He uses dessert, not to indicate the whole last course at dinner, but to 
designate the fruit only; the rest is ices or sweets. He uses vest, 
not in place of waistcoat, but in place of undershirt. Similarly, he 
applies pants, not to his trousers, but to his drawers. An English¬ 
man who inhabits bachelor quarters is said to live in chambers; if 
he has a flat he calls it a flat, and not an apartment, which term 
he reserves for a single room. 14 Flat-houses are often mansions. 
The janitor or superintendent thereof is a care-taker or porter. 
The scoundrels who snoop around in search of divorce evidence are 
not private detectives, but private enquiry agents. 

The Englishman is naturally unfamiliar with baseball, and in 
consequence his language is bare of the countless phrases and meta¬ 
phors that it has supplied to American. Many of these phrases 
and metaphors are in daily use among us, for example, fan, rooter, 
bleachers, circus-play, home-run, homer, pinch-hitter, batting-aver¬ 
age, double-header, grand-stand-play, Charley-horse, pennant-winner, 
gate-money, busher, minor-leaguer, glass-arm, to strike out, to foul, 
to be shut out, to play ball, on the bench, on to his curves and three 
strikes and out. The national game of draw-poker has also greatly 
enriched American with terms that are either quite unknown to the 
Englishman or known to him only as somewhat dubious American- 

14 According to the New International Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (Art. Apart¬ 
ment House), the term flat “is usually in the United States restricted to apart¬ 
ments in houses having no elevator or hall service.” In New York such 
apartments are commonly called walk-up-apartments or walk-ups. Even with 
the qualification, apartment is felt to be better than flat. 


AMERICAN AND ENGLISH TODAY 


131 


isms, among them, cold-deck, kitty, full-house, jack-pot, roodle, 
deuces-wild, four-flusher, ace-high, pot, penny-ante, divvy, a card up 
his sleeve, three-of-a-kind, to ante up, to stand pat, to call (a bluff), 
to pony up, to hold out, to cash in, to go it one better, to chip in 
and for keeps. But the Englishman uses many more racing terms 
and metaphors than we do and he has got a good many phrases 
from other games, particularly cricket. The word cricket itself has 
a definite figurative meaning. It indicates, in general, good sports¬ 
manship. To take unfair advantage of an opponent is not cricket. 
The sport of boating, so popular on the Thames, has also given 
colloquial English some familiar terms, almost unknown in the 
United States, e. g., punt and weir. Contrariwise, pungy, batteau 
and scow are unheard of in England, and canoe is not long emerged 
from the estate of an Americanism. 15 The game known as ten¬ 
pins in America is called nine-pins in England, and once had that 
name over here. The Puritans forbade it, and its devotees changed 
its name in order to evade the prohibition. 16 Finally, there is 
soccer, a form of football that is still relatively little known in the 
United States. What we call simply football is Rugby or Rugger to 
the Englishman. The word soccer is derived from association; the 
rules of the game were established by the London Football Associa¬ 
tion. 

But though the English talk of racing, football, cricket and golf 
a great deal, they have developed nothing comparable to the sport¬ 
ing argot used by American sporting reporters. When, during 
the war, various American soldier nines played baseball in England, 
some of the English newspapers employed visiting American re¬ 
porters to report the games, and the resultant emission of wild 
and woolly technicalities interested English readers much more 

“Canoeing was introduced into England by John MacGregor in 1866, and 
there is now a Royal Canoe Club. In America the canoe has been familiar 
from the earliest times, and in Mme. Sarah Kemble Knight’s diary (1704) 
there is much mention of cannoos. The word itself is from an Indian dialect, 
probably the Haitian, and came into American through the Spanish, in which 
it survives as oanoa. 

10 “An act was passed to prohibit playing nine-pins; as soon as the law was 
put in force, it was notified everywhere, ‘Ten-pins played here.' ”—Capt. 
Marryat: Diary in America, vol. iii, p. 195. 


132 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


than the games themselves. An English correspondent, greatly 
excited, sent me the following from the Times of May 26, 1919: 

The pastime was featured by the heavy stick work of Wallace, former Har¬ 
vard University man, who slammed out a three-bagger and a clean home-run 
in three trys with the willow. The brand of twirling for both teams was 
exceptionally good, and the fielding not at all bad considering the chances 
the A. E. F. boys have had to practise since crossing the deep to join the bigger 
game over here. For the first three frames both teams hung tough and allowed 
no scoring, and both Shawenecy and Thomas appeared to have everything neces¬ 
sary, with Shawenecy holding the edge. Fourth innings netted a brace for 
the home lads. Ives clouted one to centre and Richards let the sphere slip; 
Eagle watched four bad ones go by, and, after Ives was tagged trying to steal 
home, was pushed over for the first tally when Williams leaned against one 
for two sacks. Shawenecy went bad here and gave Storey a free ticket, and 
Wallace came through with a three station bingle that shoved Williams and 
Storey across. Brown ended the agony by missing three. 

This jargon, as I say, flabbergasted England, but it would be 
hard to find an American who could not understand it. As a set-off 
to it—and to nineteenth hole, the one American contribution to the 
argot of golf, if African golf for craps be omitted—the English have 
an ecclesiastical vocabulary with which we are almost unacquainted, 
and it is in daily use, for the church bulks large in public affairs 
over there. Such terms as vicar, canon, verger, prebendary, pri¬ 
mate, curate, nonconformist, dissenter, convocation, minster, chap¬ 
ter, crypt, living, presentation, glebe, benefice, locum tenens, suffra¬ 
gan, almoner, dean and pluralist are to be met with in the English 
newspapers constantly, but on this side of the water they are seldom 
encountered. Nor do we hear much of matins, lauds, lay-readers, rit¬ 
ualism and the liturgy. The English use of holy orders is also 
strange to us. They do not say that a young man aspiring to sacer¬ 
dotal ease under the Establishment is studying for the ministry, but 
that he is reading for holy orders. Save he be in the United Free 
Church of Scotland, he is seldom called a minister, though the term 
appears in the Book of Common Prayer; save he be a nonconformist, 
he is never a pastor; a clergyman of the Establishment is always 
either a rector, a vicar, or a curate, and colloquially a parson , 17 

11 1 am informed by the Rev. W. G. Polack, of Evansville, Ind., that certain 
Lutherans in the United States, following German usage, employ vicar to 
designate “a theological student, not yet ordained, who is doing temporary 


AMERICAN AND ENGLISH TODAY 


133 


In American chapel simply means a small church, usually the 
dependant of some larger one; in English it has acquired the special 
sense of a place of worship unconnected with the Establishment. 
Though three^fourths of the people of Ireland are Catholics (in 
Munster and Connaught, more than nine-tenths), and the Protestant 
Church of Ireland has been disestablished since 1871, a Catholic 
place of worship in that country is still legally a cliapel and not a 
church}* So is a Methodist wailing-place in England, however large 
it may be, though now and then tabernacle is substituted. Chapel, of 
course, is also used to designate a small church of the Establishment, 
as St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. A Methodist, in Great Britain, 
is not ordinarily a Methodist, but a Wesleyan. Contrariwise, what 
the English call simply a churchman is an Episcopalian in the 
United States, what they call the Church (always capitalized!) is 
the Protestant Episcopal Church, 19 what they call a Roman Catho¬ 
lic is simply a Catholic, and what they call a. Jew is usually softened 
(if he happens to be an advertiser) to a Hebrew. The English 
Jews have no such idiotic fear of the plain name as that which 
afflicts the more pushing and obnoxious of the race in America. 20 
“News of Jewry” is a common headline in the London Doily 
Telegraph, which is owned by Lord Burnham, a Jew, and has had 

supply-work in a mission congregation.” The verb, to vicar, means to occupy 
such a pulpit. Mr. Polack is occupied with an interesting inquiry into the 
American ecclesiastical vocabulary. He believes that mission-festival, common 
in the Middle West, comes from the German missionsfest. So with agenda, 
used by some of the Lutheran churches to designate their Book of Common 
Prayer. He says that it is not the English term, but the German agende. 
He notes the use of services to indicate a single service (this is common 
throughout the United States) ; the decay of reverend to revemor, revemer, 
revenor or revener; the use of confirmand to designate a candidate for confirma¬ 
tion ; the use of to announce to indicate notifying a pastor of an intention to 
partake of communion (Ger. sich anmelden) ; and the use of confessional- 
address (beichtrede). All these terms are used by English-speaking Lutherans. 

16 “The term chapel,” says Joyce, in English as We Speak It in Ireland, “has 
so ingrained itself in my mind that to this hour the word instinctively springs 
to my lips when I am about to mention a Catholic place of worship; and I 
always feel some sort of hesitation or reluctance in substituting the word 
church. I positively could not bring myself to say, ‘Come, it is time now to 
set out for church.' It must be either mass or chapel.” 

18 Certain dissenters, of late, show a disposition to borrow the American 
usage. Thus the Christian World, organ of the English Congregationalists, 
uses Episcopal to designate the Church of England. 

30 So long ago as the 70’s certain Jews petitioned the publishers of Webster’s 
and Worcester’s dictionaries to omit their definitions of the verb to jew, and 
according to Richard Grant White, the publisher of Worcester’s complied. 
Such a request, in England, would be greeted with derision. 



134 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


many Jews on its staff, including Judah P. Benjamin, the Ameri¬ 
can. The American language, of course, knowns nothing of dis¬ 
senters. Hor of such gladiators of dissent as the Plymouth Brethren, 
nor of the nonconformist conscience, though the United States suf¬ 
fers from it even more damnably than England. The English, to 
make it even, get on without circuit-riders, holy-rollers, Dunkards, 
hard-shell Baptists, United Brethren, Seventh Day Adventists and 
other such American ferae natures and are bom, live, die and go to 
heaven without the aid of either the uplift or the chautauqua. 

In music the English cling to an archaic and unintelligible 
nomenclature, long since abandoned in America. Thus they call a 
double whole note a breve, a whole note a semibreve, a half note a 
minim, a quarter note a crotchet, an eighth note a quaver, a six¬ 
teenth note a semi-quaver, a thirty-second note a demisemiquaver, 
and a sixty-fourth note a hemidemisemiquaver, or semidemisemir 
quaver. If, by any chance, an English musician should write a 
one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth note he probably wouldn’t know what 
to call it. This clumsy terminology goes back to the days of plain 
chant, with its longa, brevis, semi-brevis, minima and semiminima. 
The French and Italians cling to a system almost as confusing, but 
the Germans use ganze, halbe, viertel, achtel, etc. I have been un¬ 
able to discover the beginning of the American system, but it would 
seem to be borrowed from the German. Since the earliest times 
a great many of the music teachers in the United States have been 
Germans, and some of the rest have had German training. 

In the same way the English hold fast (though with a slack¬ 
ing of the grip of late) to a clumsy and inaccurate method of 
designating the sizes of printers’ types. In America the simple 
point system makes the business easy; a line of lJ^-point type oc¬ 
cupies exactly the vertical space of two lines of 7-point. But the 
English still indicate differences in size by such arbitrary and 
confusing names as brilliant, diamond, small pearl, pearl, ruby, 
ruby-nonpareil, nonpareil, minion-nonpareil, emerald, minion, bre¬ 
vier, bourgeois, long primer, small pica, pica, English, great primer 
and double pica. They also cling to various archaic measures. 
Thus, an Englishman will say that he weighs eleven stone instead of 
154 pounds. A stone is 14 pounds, and it is always used in stating 




AMERICAN AND ENGLISH TODAY 


135 


the heft of a man. He employs such designations of time as fort¬ 
night and twelve-month a great deal more than we do, and has cer¬ 
tain special terms of which we know nothing, for example, quarter- 
day, hank-holiday, long-vacation, Lady Day and Michaelmas. Per 
contra, he knows nothing whatever of our Thanksgiving, Arbor, 
Labor and Decoration Days or of legal holidays or of Yom Kippur. 
Finally, he always says “a quarter to nine,” not “a quarter of nine.” 
He rarely says fifteen minutes to; nearly always he uses quarter to. 
He never says a quarter hour or a half hour; he says a quarter of an 
hour or half an hour. 

In English usage, to proceed, the word directly is always used to 
signify immediately; in American a contingency gets into it, and 
it may mean no more than soon. In England, according to the Con¬ 
cise Oxford Dictionary, quite means “completely, wholly, entirely, 
altogether, to the utmost extent, nothing short of, in the fullest sense, 
positively, absolutely”; in America it is conditional, and means 
only nearly, approximately, substantially, as in “he sings quite well.” 
An Englishman doesn’t look up a definition in a dictionary; he 
looks it out. He doesn’t say, being ill, “I am getting on well,” but 
“I am going on well.” He never adds the pronoun in such locutions 
as “it hurts me,” but says simply, “it hurts.” He never “ catches up 
with you” on the street; he “catches you up.” He never says “are 
you through?” but “have you finished?” or “are you done?” He 
never uses to notify as a transitive verb; an official act may be 
notified, but not a person. He never uses gotten as the perfect par¬ 
ticiple of get; he always uses plain got. 21 An English servant never 
washes the dishes; she always washes the dinner or tea things. She 
doesn’t live out, but goes into service. Her beau is not her fellow, 
but her young man. She does not keep company with him but walks 
out with him. She is never hired, but always engaged; only inani¬ 
mate things, such as a hall or cab, are hired. When her wages are 
increased she does not get a raise, but a rise. When her young man 
goes into the army he does not join it; he joins up. 

That an Englishman always calls out “1 say!” and not simply 
“say!” when he desires to attract a friend’s attention or register 
a protestation of incredulity—this perhaps is too familiar to need 
31 But nevertheless he uses begotten, not begot. 


136 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


notice. His hear, hear! and oh, oh! are also well known. He is 
much less prodigal with good-bye than the American; he uses good- 
day and good-afternoon far more often. Various very common 
American phrases are quite unknown to him, for example, over his 
signature. This he never uses, and he has no equivalent for it; an 
Englishman who issues a signed statement simply makes it in 
writing. His pet-name for a tiller of the soil it not Rube or Cy, 
but Hodge. When he goes gunning he does not call it hunting, but 
shooting; hunting is reserved for the chase of the fox. When he 
goes to a dentist he does not have his teeth filled, but stopped. He 
knows nothing of European plan hotels. 

An intelligent Englishwoman, coming to America to live, told 
me that the two things which most impeded her first communica¬ 
tions with untraveled Americans, even above the gross differences 
between English and American pronunciation and intonation, were 
the complete absence of the general utility adjective jolly from the 
American vocabulary, and the puzzling omnipresence and versa¬ 
tility of the verb to fix. In English colloquial usage jolly means 
almost anything; it intensifies all other adjectives, even including 
miserable and homesick. An Englishman is jolly bored, jolly hun¬ 
gry or jolly well tired; his wife is jolly sensible; his dog is jolly 
keen; the prices he pays for things are jolly dear (never steep or 
stiff or high: all Americanisms). But he has no noun to match the 
American proposition, meaning proposal, business, affair, case, con¬ 
sideration, plan, theory, device, invention, solution and what not: 
only the German zug can be ranged beside it . 22 And he has no verb 
in such wide practise as to fix. In his speech it means only to make 
fast or to determine. In American it may mean to repair, as in “the 
plumber fixed the pipe”; to dress, as in “Mary fixed her hair”; to 
prepare, as in “the cook is fixing the gravy”; to bribe, as in “the judge 
was fixed”; to settle, as in “the quarrel was fixed up”; to heal, as in 

“This specimen is from the Congressional Record of Dec. 11, 1917: “I do 
not like to be butting into this proposition, but I looked upon this post-office 
business as a purely business proposition .” The speaker was “Hon.” Homer P. 
Snyder, of New York. In the Record of Jan. 12, 1918, p. 8294, proposition 
is used as a synonym for state of affairs. See also a speech by Senator Norris 
on Feb. 21, 1921, Congressional Record, p. 3741 et seq. He uses proposition in 
five or six different senses. See also a speech by Senator Borah, Congressional 
Record, May 13, 1921, p. 1395, col. 1. 


AMERICAN AND ENGLISH TODAY 


137 


“the doctor fixed his boil'’; to finish, as in “Murphy fixed Sweeney 
in the third round”; to he well-todo, as in “John is well -fixed”; 
to arrange, as in “I fixed up the quarrel”; to he drunk, as in “the 
whiskey fixed him”; to punish, as in “I’ll fix him”; and to correct, 
as in “he fixed my bad Latin.” Moreover, it is used in all its Eng¬ 
lish senses. An Englishman never goes to a dentist to have his 
teeth fixed. He does not fix the fire; he makes it up, or mends it. 
He is never well-fixed, either in money or by liquor. 23 The Ameri¬ 
can use of to run is also unfamiliar to Englishmen. They never run 
a hotel, or a railroad; they always keep it or manage it. 

The English use quite a great deal more than we do, and, as 
we have seen, in a different sense. Quite rich, in American, means 
tolerably rich, richer than most; quite so, in English, is identical 
in meaning with exactly so. In American just is almost equivalent 
to the English quite, as in just lovely. Thornton shows that this 
use of just goes back to 1794. The word is also used in place of 
exactly in other ways, as in just in time, just how many and just 
what do you mean? Two other adverbs, right and good, are used in 
American in senses strange to an Englishman. Thornton shows that 
the excessive use of right, as in right away, right good and right now, 
was already widespread in the United States early in the last cen¬ 
tury; his first example is dated 1818. He believes that the locution 
was “possibly imported from the southwest of Ireland.” Whatever 
its origin, it quickly attracted the attention of English visitors. 
Dickens noted right away as an almost universal Americanism dur¬ 
ing his first American tour, in 1842, and poked fun at it in the 
second chapter of “American Notes.” Right is used as a synonym 
for directly, as in right away, right off, right now and right on time; 
for moderately, as in right well, right smart, right good and right 
often, and in place of precisely, as in right there. Some time ago, 
in an article on Americanisms, an English critic called it “that most 
distinctively American word,” and concocted the following dialogue 
to instruct the English in its use: 

“Already in 1855 Bristed was protesting that to fix was having “more than 
its legitimate share of work all over the Union.” “In English conversation,” 
he said, “the panegyrical adjective of all work is nice; in America it is fine .” 
This was before the adoption of jolly and its analogues, ripping, stunning, 
rattling, etc. Perhaps to fix was helped into American by the German word, 


138 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


How do I get to -? 

Go right along, and take the first turning (sic) on the right, and you are 
right there. 

Right? 

Right. 

Right! 2 * 

But this Englishman failed in his attempt to write correct Amer¬ 
ican, despite his fine pedagogical passion. No American would ever 
say “take the first turning”; he would say “turn at the first corner.” 
As for right away, R. 0. Williams argues that “so far as analogy 
can make good English, it is as good as one could choose.” Never¬ 
theless, the Concise Oxford Dictionary admits it only as an Ameri¬ 
canism, and avoids all mention of the other American uses of right. 
Goad is almost as protean. It is not only used as a general synonym 
for all adjectives and adverbs connoting satisfaction, as in to feel 
good, to he treated good, to sleep good, but also as a reinforcement to 
other adjectives and adverbs, as in “I hit him good and hard” and 
“I am good and tired.” Of late some has come into wide use as an 
adjective-adverb of all work, indicating special excellence or high 
degree, as in some girl, some sicJc, going some, etc. It is still below 
the salt, but threatens to reach a more respectable position. One 
encounters it in the newspapers constantly and in the Congressional 
Record, and not long ago a writer in the Atlantic Monthly 25 hymned 
it ecstatically as “some word—a true super-word, in fact” and 
argued that it could be used “in a sense for which there is absolutely 
no synonym in the dictionary.” It was used by the prim Emily 
Dickinson forty or more years ago. 26 It will concern us again in 
Chapter IX. 


3. 

Honorifics 

Among the honorifics in everyday use in England and the United 
States one finds many notable divergences between the two lan¬ 
guages. On the one hand the English are almost as diligent as the 

24 1 Speak United States, Saturday Review, Sept. 22, 1894. 

“Should Language Be Abolished? by Harold Goddard, July, 1918, p. 63. 
“Quoted by Gamaliel Bradford in the Atlantic Monthly, Aug., 1919, p. 219. 



AMERICAN AND ENGLISH TODAY 


139 


Germans in bestowing titles of honor upon their men of mark, and 
on the other hand they are very careful to withhold such titles from 
men who do not legally hear them. In America every practitioner 
of any branch of the healing art, even a chiropodist or an osteopath, 
is a doctor ipso facto, hut in England a good many surgeons lack the 
title and it is not common in the lesser ranks. Even physicians may 
not have it, but here there is a yielding of the usual meticulous 
exactness, and it is customary to address a physician in the second 
person as Doctor, though his card may show that he is only Medicince 
Baccalaureus, a degree quite unknown in America. Thus an Eng¬ 
lishman, when he is ill, always sends for the doctor, as we do. 
But a surgeon is usually plain Mr., 27 and prefers to be so called, 
even when he is an M. D. An English veterinarian or dentist or 
druggist or masseur is never Dr. 

ISTor Professor. In all save a few large cities of America every 
male pedagogue is a professor, and so is every band leader, dancing 
master and medical consultant. But in England the title is very 
rigidly restricted to men who hold chairs in the universities, a neces¬ 
sarily small body. Even here a superior title always takes prece¬ 
dence. Thus, it used to be Professor Almroth Wright, but now it 
is always Sir Almroth Wright. Huxley was always called Pro¬ 
fessor Huxley until he was appointed to the Privy Council. This 
appointment gave him the right to have Right Honourable put be¬ 
fore his name, and thereafter it was customary to call him simply 
Mr. Huxley, with the Right Honourable, so to speak, floating in the 
air. The combination, to an Englishman, was more flattering than 
Professor, for the English always esteem political dignities far more 
than the dignities of learning. This explains, perhaps, why their 
universities distribute so few honorary degrees. In the United 
States every respectable Protestant clergyman, save perhaps a few 
in the Protestant Episcopal Church, is a D. D., and it is almost 
impossible for a man to get into the papers without becoming 

27 In the Appendix to the Final Report of the Royal Commission on Venereal 
Diseases, London, 1916, p. iv, I find the following: “Mr. C. J. Svmonds, 
F.R.C.S., M.D.; Mr. F. J. McCann, F.R.C.S., M.D.; Mr. A. F. Evans, F.R.C.S. 
Mr. Symonds is consulting surgeon to Guy’s Hospital, Mr. McCann is an eminent 
London gynecologist, and Mr. Evans is a general surgeon in large practice. All 
would be called Doctor in the United States. See also Tract IV, of the Society 
for Pure English; Oxford, 1920, p. 33. 


140 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


an LL. D., 28 but in England such honors are granted only grudg¬ 
ingly. So with military titles. To promote a war veteran from 
sergeant to colonel by acclamation, as is often done in the United' 
States, is unknown over there. The English have nothing equivalent 
to the gaudy tin soldiers of our governors’ staffs, nor to the be¬ 
spangled colonels and generals of the Knights Templar and Patri¬ 
archs Militant, nor to the nondescript captains and majors of our 
country towns. An English railroad conductor ( railway guard ) is 
never Captain, as he often is in the United States. Nor are mili¬ 
tary titles used by the police. Nor is it the custom to make every 
newspaper editor a colonel, as is done south of the Potomac. (In 
parts of the South even an auctioneer is a colonel!) Nor is an 
attorney-general or consul-general or postmaster-general called Gen¬ 
eral. Nor are the glories of public office, after they have officially 
come to an end, embalmed in such clumsy quasi-titles as ex-United 
States Senator, ex-Judge of the Circuit Court of Appeals, ex-Fed- 
eral Trade Commissioner and former Chief of the Fire Department. 

But perhaps the greatest difference between English and Amer¬ 
ican usage is presented by the Honorable. In the United States the 
title is applied loosely to all public officials of apparent respecta¬ 
bility, from senators and ambassadors to the mayors of fifth-rate 
cities and the members of state legislatures, and with some show 
of official sanction to many of them, especially congressmen. But 
it is questionable whether this application has any actual legal 
standing, save perhaps in the case of certain judges, who are referred 
to as the Hon. in their own court records. Even the President of the 
United States, by law, is not the Honorable, but simply the Presi¬ 
dent. In the First Congress the matter of his title was exhaustively 
debated; some members wanted to call him the Honorable and others 
proposed His Excellency and even His Highness. But the two 
Houses finally decided that it was “not proper to annex any style 
or title other than that expressed by the Constitution.” Congress- 

®I have before me an invitation to a dinner given by the Society of Art 9 
and Letters in New York. On the invitation committee are Charles M. Schwab, 
LL.D., Otto H. Kahn, LL.D., and Abram I. Elkus, LL.D. Billy Sunday, the 
evangelist, is a D.D. In the South every negro preacher is addressed by whites 
either as Reverend or as Doctor. This enables them to show a decent respect for 
his ghostly office, and yet avoid the solecism of calling him Mister. 


AMERICAN AND ENGLISH TODAY 


141 


men themselves are not Honorables. True enough, the Congressional 
Record, in printing a set speech, calls it “Speech of Hon. John 
Jones” (without the the before the Hon. —a characteristic Ameri¬ 
canism), but in reporting the ordinary remarks of a member it 
always calls him plain Mr. Nevertheless, a country congressman 
would be offended if his partisans, in announcing his appearance on 
the stump, did not prefix Hon. to his name. So would a state sena¬ 
tor. So would a mayor or governor. I have seen the sergeant-at- 
arms of the United States Senate referred to as Hon. in the records 
of that body. More, it has been applied in the same place to Sam 
Gompers, the tame labor agitator. Yet more, the prefix is actually 
usurped by the Superintendent of State Prisons of New York. 29 

In England the thing is more carefully ordered, and bogus Hons. 
are unknown. The prefix is 'applied to both sexes and belongs by 
law, inter alia, to all present or past maids of honor, to all justices 
of the High Court during their term of office, to the Scotch Lords 
of Session, to the sons and daughters of viscounts and barons, to 
the younger sons of earls, and to the members of the legislative 
and executive councils of the colonies. But not to members of 
Parliament, though each is, in debate, an hon. gentleman. Even 
a member of the cabinet is not an Hon., though he is a 
Right Hon. by virtue of membership in the Privy Council, of 
which the Cabinet is legally merely a committee. This last honor¬ 
ific belongs, not only to privy councillors,*but also to all peers lower 
than marquesses (those above are Most Hon.), to Lord Mayors during 
their terms of office, to the Lord Advocate and to the Lord Provosts 
of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Moreover, a peeress whose husband 
is a Right Hon. is a Right Hon. herself. 

The British colonies follow the jealous usage of the mother- 
country. Even in Canada the lawless American example is not 
imitated. I have before me a “Table of Titles to be Used in Can¬ 
ada,” laid down by royal warrant, which lists those who are Hons. 
and those who are not Hons, in the utmost detail. Only privy coun- 

” See, for the sergeant-at-arms, the Congressional Record, May 16, 1918, p. 
7147. For Gompers, the Congressional Record, July 19, 1919, p. 3017. For 
the superintendent of prisons his annual reports, printed at Sing Sing Prison. 
This perhaps is not the worst. I sometimes receive letters from a United 
States Senator. Almost invariably his secretary makes me Hon. on the envelope. 


142 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


cillors of Canada (not to be confused with imperial privy coun¬ 
cillors) are permitted to retain the prefix after going out of office, 
though ancients who were legislative councillors at the time of the 
union, July 1, 1867, may still use it by a sort of courtesy, and 
former speakers of the Dominion Senate and House of Commons and 
various retired judges may do so on application to the King, counter¬ 
signed by the governor-general. The following are lawfully the 
Hon., but only during their tenure of office: the solicitor-general, the 
speaker of the House of Commons, the presidents and speakers of 
the provincial legislatures, members of the executive councils of the 
provinces, the chief justice, the judges of the Supreme Courts of 
Ontario, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, British Columbia, Prince 
Edward Island, Saskatchewan and Alberta, the judges of the Courts 
of Appeal of Manitoba and British Columbia, the Chancery Court 
of Prince Edward Island, and the Circuit Court of Montreal—these, 
and no more. A lieutenant-governor of a province is not the Hon., 
but His Honor. The governor-general is His Excellency, and so is 
his wife, but in practise they usually have superior honorifics, and 
do not forget to demand their use. In Australia, it would seem, 
the Hon. is extended to members of the Federal Parliament; at 
least one of them, to my personal knowledge, has the title engraved 
upon his visiting-card! 

But though an Englishman, and, following him, a colonial, is 
thus very careful to restrict the Hon. to its legal uses, he always 
insists, when he serves without pay as an officer of any organization, 
upon indicating his volunteer character by writing Hon. meaning 
honorary, before the name of his office. If he leaves it off it is a sign 
that he is a hireling. Thus, the agent of the New Zealand government 
in London, a paid officer, is simply the agent, but the agents at Bris¬ 
bane and Adelaide, in Australia, who serve for the glory of it, are 
hon. agents. In writing to a Briton of condition one must be careful 
to put Esq., behind his name, and not Mr., before it. The English 
make a clear distinction between the two forms. Mr., on an en¬ 
velope, indicates that the sender holds the receiver to be his in¬ 
ferior; one writes to Mr. John Jackson, one’s green-grocer, but to 
James Thompson, Esq., one’s neighbor. Any man who is entitled to 
the Esq. is a gentleman, by which an Englishman means a man of 



AMERICAN AND ENGLISH TODAY 


143 


sound connections and what is regarded as dignified occupation—in 
brief, of ponderable social position. But though he is thus watch¬ 
ful of masculine dignity, an Englishman is quite careless in 
the use of lady. He speaks glibly of lady-clerics, lady-typists, 
lady-doctors and lady-inspectors. In America there is a strong 
disposition to use the word less and less, as is revealed by 
the substitution of saleswoman and salesgirl for the saleslady 
of yesteryear. But in England lady is still invariably used in¬ 
stead of woman in such compounds as lady-golfer, lady-secretary 
and lady-champion. The womens singles, in English tennis, are 
always ladies’ singles; women s wear, in English shops, is always 
ladies’ wear. Perhaps the cause of this distinction between lady 
and gentleman has been explained by Price Collier in “England 
and the English.” In England, according to Collier, the male is 
always first. His comfort goes before his wife’s comfort, and maybe 
his dignity also. Gentleman-cl eric or gentleman-autlior would make 
an Englishman howl, though he uses gentleman-rider and gentleman- 
player in place of oui* amateur. So would the growing American 
custom of designating successive members of a private family bear¬ 
ing the same given name by the numerals proper to royalty. John 
Smith 3rd and William Simpson J+th are gravely received at Har¬ 
vard; at Oxford they would be ragged unmercifully. 

An Englishman, in speaking or writing of public officials, avoids 
those long and clumsy combinations of title and name which figure 
so copiously in American newspapers. Such locutions as Assistant- 
Secretary of the Interior Jones, Fourth Assistant Postmaster-Gen¬ 
eral Brown, Inspector of Boilers Smith, Judge of the Appeal Tax 
Court Robinson, Chief Cleric of the Treasury Williams and Collab¬ 
orating Epidermologist White 30 are quite unknown to him. When 
he mentions a high official, such as the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, 
he does not think it necessary to add the man’s name; he simply 
says “the Secretary for Foreign Affairs” or “the Foreign Secretary.” 
And so with the Lord Chancellor, the Chief Justice, the Prime 
Minister, the Bishop of Carlisle, the Chief Rabbi, the First Lord 

30 1 encountered this gem in Public Health Reports, a government publication, 
for April 26, 1918, p. 619. 


144 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


(of the Admiralty), the Master of Pembroke (College), the Italian 
Ambassador, and so on. Certain ecclesiastical titles are sometimes 
coupled to surnames in the American manner, as in Dean Stanley, 
and Canon Wilberforce, but Prime Minister Lloyd-George would 
seem heavy and absurd. But in other directions the Englishman 
has certain clumsinesses of his own. Thus, in writing a letter to a 
relative stranger he sometimes begins it, not My dear Mr. Jones 
but My dear John Joseph Jones. He may even use such a form as 
My dear Secretary of War in place of the American My dear Mr. 
Secretary. In English usage, incidentally, Dear is more formal 
than My dear. In America the exact contrary is the case. 31 

I have spoken of the American custom of dropping the definite 
article before Hon. It extends to Rev. and the like, and has the 
authority of very respectable usage behind it. The opening sen¬ 
tence of the Congressional Record is always: “The Chaplain, Rev. 

-, D. D., offered the following prayer.” When chaplains for the 

army or navy are confirmed by the Senate they always appear in 
the Record as Revs., never as the Revs. I also find the honorific 
without the article in the Hew International Encyclopaedia, in the 
World Almanac, and in a widely-popular American grammar-book. 32 
So long ago as 1867, Gould protested against this elision as bar¬ 
barous and idiotic, and drew up the following reductio ad absurdum: 

At last annual meeting of Black Book Society, honorable John Smith took 
the chair, assisted by reverend John Brown and venerable John White. The 
office of secretary would have been filled by late John Green, but for his decease, 
which rendered him ineligible. His place was supplied by inevitable John 
Black. In the course of the evening eulogiums were pronounced on distin¬ 
guished John Gray and notorious Joseph Brown. Marked compliment was also 
paid to able historian Joseph White, discriminating philosopher Joseph Green, 
and learned professor Joseph Black. But conspicuous speech of the evening 
was witty Joseph Gray’s apostrophe to eminent astronomer Jacob Brown, subtle 
logician Jacob White, etc., etc. 


31 Cf. a letter by Archibald Marshall in the London Mercury, Sept., 1922. 
The point as also discussed in Etiquette, by Emily Post; New York, 1922, p. 455. 

32 For the Record see any issue. F"or the New International Encyclopaedia see 
the article on Brotherhood of Andrew and Philip. For the World Almanac 
see the ed. of 1921, p. 195. The grammar-book is Longman’s Briefer Grammar; 
New York, 1908, p. 160. The editor is George J. Smith, a member of the board 
of examiners of the New Y T ork City Department of Education. 



AMERICAN AND ENGLISH TODAY 


145 


Richard Grant White, a year or two later, joined the attack in 
the New York Galaxy, and William Cullen Bryant included the 
omission of the article in his Index Expur gat orius, but these anath¬ 
emas were as ineffective as Gould’s irony. The more careful 
American journals, of course, incline to the the, and I note that 
it is specifically ordained on the Style-sheet of the Century Maga¬ 
zine, but the overwhelming majority of American newspapers get 
along without it, and I have often noticed its omission on the sign¬ 
boards at church entrances. 33 In England it is seldom omitted. 34 


4. 


Euphemisms 

But such euphemisms as lady-clerk, are, after all, much rarer in 
English than in American usage. The Englishman seldom tries 
to gloss menial occupations with sonorous names; on the contrary, 
he seems to delight in keeping their menial character plain. He 
says servants, not help. Even his railways and banks have servants; 
the chief trades-union of the English railroad men is the Amalga¬ 
mated Society of Railway Servants. He uses employe in place of 
clerk, workman or laborer much less often than we do. True 
enough he often calls a boarder a paying-guest, but that is prob¬ 
ably because even a lady may occasionally take one in. Just as he 
avoids calling a fast train the limited, the flier or the cannon-ball, 
so he never calls an undertaker a funeral director or mortician , 35 or a 
dentist a dental surgeon or odontologist, or a real estate agent a real- 

33 Despite the example of Congress, however, the Department of State in¬ 
serts the the. Vide the Congressional Record, May 4, 1918, p. 6552. But the 
War Department, the Treasury and the Post Office omit it. Vide the Con¬ 
gressional Record, May 11, 1918, p. 6895 and p. 6914 and May 14, p. 7004, 
respectively. So, it appears, does the White House. Vide the Congressional 
Record, May 10, 1918, p. 6838. 

34 1 wrote this in 1918. In 1914 the Society for Pure English had been or¬ 
ganized in England, with the Poet Laureate, Dr. Henry Bradley, A. J. Balfour, 
Edmund Gosse, George Saintsbury, and other eminent purists among its charter 
members. In October, 1919, it issued its first tract—and on page 12 I found 
Rev., Very Rev. and Rt. Hon. without the the! 

85 In the 60’s an undertaker was often called an embalming surgeon in 
America. 


146 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


tor, or a 'press-agent a publicist, or a barber shop (he always makes it 
barber s shop ) a tonsorial parlor, or a common public-house a cafe , 
restaurant, exchange, buffet or hotel, or a tradesman a store¬ 
keeper or merchant, or a fresh-water college a university. A 
university, in England, always means a collection of colleges. 36 He 
avoids displacing terms of a disparaging or disagreeable significance 
with others less brutal, or thought to he less brutal, e. g., ready-to- 
wear, ready-tailored, or ready-to-put-on for ready-made, used or 
slightly-used for second-hand, popular priced for cheap , 37 mahog- 
anized for imitation mahogany, aisle manager for floor-walker (he 
makes it shop-walker), loan-office for pawn-shop. 33 Also he is 
careful not to use such words as rector, deacon and baccalaureate in 
merely rhetorical senses. 39 Nor does he call mutton lamb, or milk 
cream). Nor does he use cuspidor for spittoon, or B. V. D/s as a 
euphemism for underwear, or butterine for oleomargarine. 

“Business titles,” says W. L. George, 40 “are given in America 
more readily than in England. Men are distinguished by being 
called president of a corporation. I know one president whose staff 
consists of two typists. Many firms have four vice-presidents. Or 
there is a press-representative, or a purchasing-agent. In the maga¬ 
zines you seldom find merely an editor; the others need their share 
of honor, so they are associate (not assistant ) editors. A dentist is 
called a doctor. The hotel valet is a tailor. Magistrates of police- 
courts are judges instead of merely Mr. I wandered into a uni¬ 
versity, knowing nobody, and casually asked for the dean. I was 
asked, ‘Which deanT In that building there were enough deans 
to stock all the English cathedrals. The master of a secret society is 
royal supreme knight commander. Perhaps I reached the ex- 

30 In a list of American “universities” I find the Christian of Canton, Mo., 
with 125 students; the Lincoln, of Pennsylvania, with 184; the Southwestern 
Presbyterian, of Clarksville, Tenn., with 86; and the Newton Theological, with 
77. Most of these, of course, are merely country high-schools. 

37 Compare the German civile preise. 

38 The Australians use the French mont-de-piAte. Australian euphemisms de¬ 
serve to be investigated. No doubt the presence of so many convicts among 
the early settlers caused a great number to be invented. 

39 The Rev. John C. Stephenson in the ’New York Sun, July 10, 1914; . . . 
“that empty courtesy of addressing every clergyman as Doctor. . . . And let us 
abolish the abuse of . . . baccalaureate sermons for sermons before graduating 
classes of high schools and the like.” 

40 Hail, Columbia!; New York, 1921, pp. 92-3. 


AMERICAN AND ENGLISH TODAY 


147 


treme at a theatre in Boston, when I wanted something, I forget 
what, and was told that I must apply to the chief of the ushers. Hie 
was a mild little man, who had something to do with people getting 
into their seats, rather a come-down from the pomp and circum¬ 
stance of his title. Growing interested, I examined my program, 
with the following result: It is not a large theatre, but it has a 
'press-representative, a treasurer (box-office clerk), an assistant treas¬ 
urer (box-office junior clerk), an advertising-agent, our old friend 
the chief of the ushers, a stage-manager, a head-electrician, a mas¬ 
ter of properties (in England called props), a leader of the orchestra 
(pity this—why not president ?), and a matron (occupation un¬ 
known).” George might have unearthed some even stranger mag- 
nificoes in other play-houses. I once knew an ancient bill-sticker, 
attached permanently to a Baltimore theatre, who boasted the 
sonorous title of chief lithographer. 

I have already spoken of the freer use of Jew in England. In 
American newspapers it seems likely to he displaced by Hebrew, 
largely through the influence of Jewish advertisers who, for some 
strange reason or other, look upon Hebrew as more flattering. The 
Jews in England—that is, those of enough public importance to 
make themselves heard—are in the main of considerable education, 
and so they are above any silly shrinking from the name of Jew. 
But in the United States there is a class of well-to-do commercial 
Jews of a peculiarly ignorant and obnoxious type—chiefly depart¬ 
ment-store owners, professional Jewish philanthropists, and their at¬ 
tendant rabbis, lawyers, doctors, and so on—and the great majority 
of newspapers are disposed to truckle to their every whim. Along 
about the year 1900 they began to protest against the use of the word 
Jew to differentiate Jewish law-breakers from the baptized, and, 
soon thereafter, to be on the safe side, the newspapers began to em¬ 
ploy Hebrew whenever it was necessary to designate an institution 
or individual of the Chosen. Thus, one often encounters such ab¬ 
surdities as Hebrew congregation, Hebrew rabbi and Hebrew holi¬ 
days. A few years ago a number of more cultured American Jews, 
alarmed by the imbecility into which the campaign was falling, 
issued a “Note on the Word Jew” for the guidance of newspapers. 
From this document I extract the following: 



148 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


1. The words Jew and Jewish can never be objectionable when applied to 
the whole body of Israel, or to whole classes within tha+ body, as, for instance, 
Jewish young men. 

2. There can be no objection to the use of the words Jew and Jewish when 
contrast is being made with other religions: “ Jews observe Passover and 
Christians Easter.” 

3. The application of the word Jew or Jewish to any individual is to be 
avoided unless from the context it is necessary to call attention to his religion; 
in other words, unless the facts have some relation to his being a Jew or to 
his Jewishness. . . . Thus, if a Jew is convicted of a crime he should not be 
called a Jewish criminal; and on the other hand, if a Jew makes a great 
scientific discovery he should not be called an eminent Jewish scientist. 

4. The word Jew is a noun, and should never be used as an adjective or 
verb. To speak of Jew girls or Jew stores is both objectionable and vulgar. 
Jewish is the adjective. The use of Jew as a verb, in to Jew down , is a slang 
survival of the medieval term of opprobrium, and should be avoided altogether. 

5. The word Hebrew should not be used instead of Jew. As a noun it con* 
notes rather the Jewish people of the distant past, as the ancient Hebrews. 
As an adjective it has an historical rather than a religious connotation; one 
cannot say the Hebrew religion, but the Jewish religion. 


Unfortunately this temperate and intelligent pronunciamento 
seems to have had but little effect. 41 Potash and Perlmutter still in¬ 
sist that the papers they support refer to them as Hebrews, and the 
thing is docilely done. In the vaudeville journal, Variety, which 
is owned and edited by a Jew, Hebrew is invariably used. I have 
often observed references to Hebrew comedians, Hebrew tragedians, 
the Hebrew drama, the Hebrew holidays and even the Hebrew 
church. For an American newspaper to refer to Jewry would be 
almost as hazardous as for it to refer to the ghetto. When the New 
York papers desire to discuss the doings of the Jewish Socialists 
on the East Side, they are forced to retire behind East side agitators 
or soap-boxers. Years ago, being city editor of a newspaper in a 
large city, I employed a reporter to cover the picturesque and often 
strikingly dramatic life of the Russian and Polish Jews in its 
slums. He staggered along for two or three months, trying in vain 
to invent terms to designate them that would not offend the large 
Jewish advertisers. Finally, the business office bombarded me with 
so many complaints that I instructed him to abandon the Jews, and 

41 Two other admirable discussions of the matter, both by Rabbi David Philip- 
son, are in the American Israelite, Jan. 12, 1922, and the American Hebrew, 
March 18, 1922. 


AMERICAN AND ENGLISH TODAY 


149 


devote himself to the Italians and Bohemians, who were all poor 
and without influential compatriots uptown. 

Save in this one particular I believe that the American news¬ 
papers have made appreciable progress toward the use of plain 
English in recent years. The gaudy style of a generation ago has 
perished, and with it have vanished its euphemisms— casket for 
coffin, obsequies for funeral, nuptial ceremony for wedding, happy 
pair for bridal couple, and consigned to earth for buried. A death 
notice offers an excellent test of a reporter; if he is an idiot he will 
invariably show it when he writes one. Save in the small towns and 
in some of the cities of the South—where an aged Methodist sister 
still “goes to her heavenly father” or “falls asleep in the arms of 
Jesus”—the newspapers of the Republic now deal with death in a 
simple and dignified manner. On account of their sharp differenti¬ 
ation between news and editorial opinion, they even avoid the “we 
regret to announce” with which all English journals begin their 
reports of eminent dissolutions. Nine-tenths of them are now con¬ 
tent to open proceedings by saying baldly that “John Smith died 
yesterday.” Nor do they slobber as they used to over weddings, 
balls, corner-stone layings and other such ceremonies. 

In other directions, however, evidences of the national liking for 
sweet words still linger. Some time ago, in the Survey, the trade 
journal of all American uplifters, Dr. Thomas Dawes Eliot, associate 
professor of sociology in the University of Chicago, printed a solemn 
argument in favor of abandoning all such harsh terms as reformatory, 
house of refuge, reform school, industrial school, parental school, 
insanity and even jail. “Each time a new [and mellifluous!] 
phrase is developed,” he said, “it seems to bring with it, or at least 
to be accompanied by, some measure of permanent gain, in stand¬ 
ards or in viewpoint, even though much of the old may continue to 
masquerade as the new. The series, alms, philanthropy, relief, 
rehabilitation, case work, family welfare, shows such a progression 
from cruder to more refined levels of charity.” Among the substi¬ 
tutions proposed by the learned professor were habit-disease for 
vice, psycho-neurosis for sin, failure to compensate for disease, treat¬ 
ment for punishment, delinquent for criminal, unmarried mother for 
illegitimate mother, out of wedlock for bastard, behavior problem for 


150 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


prostitute, colony for penitentiary, school for reformatory, psycho¬ 
pathic hospital for insane asylum, and house of detention for jail. 
Many of these new terms (or others like them) have been actually 
adopted. Practically all American insane asylums are now simple 
hospitals, and many reformatories and houses of correction have been 
converted into schools. 42 

The use of Madame as .a special title of honor for old women of 
good position survived in the United States until the 70’s. It dis¬ 
tinguished the dowager Mrs. Smith from the wife of her eldest son; 
today the word dowager, imitating the English usage, is frequently 
employed in fashionable society. 43 Madame survives among the 
colored folk, who almost always apply it to women singers' of their 
race, and often to women hairdressers, dressmakers and milliners 
also. It is felt to be a shade more distinguished than Miss or Mrs. 
White dressmakers, milliners and beauty “specialists” also occa¬ 
sionally use it, particularly in the South. 

5. 

Expletives and Forbidden Words 

When we come to words that, either intrinsically or by usage, are 
improper, a great many curious differences between English and 
American reveal themselves. The Englishman, on the whole, is more 
plain-spoken than the American, and such terms as bitch, mare and 
in foal do not commonly daunt him, largely, perhaps, because of his 
greater familiarity with country life; hut he has a formidable index 
of his own, and it includes such essentially harmless words as sick, 
stomach, bum and bug. The English use of ill for sick I have 
already noticed, and the reasons for the English avoidance of bum. 
Sick, over there, wffien used predicatively, means nauseated, and 
when an Englishman says that he was sick he means that he vomited, 
or, as an American would say, was sick at the stomach. The older 
(and still American) usage, however, survives before the noun 
and in various compounds. Sick-list, for example, is official 

“"A Limbo for Cruel Words, Survey, June 15, 1922, p. 389. 

43 Mrs. Washington was often called Lady Washington during her life-time. 
But this title seems to have died with her. 


AMERICAN AND ENGLISH TODAY 


151 


in the navy, and sick-leave is known in the army, though 
it is more common to say of a soldier that he is invalided home. 
Sick-room and sick-bed are also in common use, and sick-flag is used 
in place of the American quarantine-flag. An Englishman restricts 
the use of bug to the Cimex lectularius, or common bed-bug, and hence 
the word has highly impolite connotations. All other crawling things 
he calls insects. An American of my acquaintance once greatly 
offended an English friend by using bug for insect. The two were 
playing billiards one summer evening in the Englishman’s house, 
and various flying things came through the window and alighted 
on the cloth. The American, essaying a shot, remarked that he had 
killed a bug with his cue. To the Englishman this seemed a slan¬ 
derous reflection upon the cleanliness of his house. 44 

The Victorian era saw a great growth of absurd euphemisms in 
England, but it was in America that the thing was carried 
farthest. Bartlett hints that rooster came into use in place 
of cock as a matter of delicacy, the latter word having 
acquired an indecent anatomical significance, and tells us that, 
at one time, even bull was banned as too vulgar for refined ears. 
In place of it the early purists used cow-creature, male-cow and 
even gentleman-cow . 45 Bitch, ram, boar, stallion, buck and sow 
went the same way, and there was a day when even mare was pro¬ 
hibited. Bache tells us that pismire was also banned, antmire being 
substituted for it. To castrate became to alter. In 1847 the word 
chair was actually barred out and seat was adopted in its place. 46 
These were the palmy days of euphemism. The delicate female 
was guarded from all knowledge, and even from all suspicion, of 
evil. “To utter aloud in her presence the word shirt,” says one his- 

44 Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Gold Bug” is called “The Golden Beetle” in Eng¬ 
land. Twenty-five years ago an Englishman named Buggey, laboring under 
the odium attached to the name, had it changed to Norfolk-Howard, a com¬ 
pound made up of the title and family name of the Duke of Norfolk. The 
wits of London at once doubled his misery by adopting Norfolk-Howard as a 
euphemism for bed-bug. 

45 A recent example of the use of male-cow was quoted in the Journal of the 
American Medical Association, Nov. 17, 1917, advertising page 24. In “Sam 
Slick” (1837) a delicate maiden tells Sam that her brother is a rooster-swain 
in the navy. 

46 The New York Organ (a “family journal devoted to temperance, morality, 
education and general literature”), May 29, 1847. One of the editors of this 
delicate journal was T. S. Arthur, author of Ten Nights in a Bar-room. 


152 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


torian, “was an open insult.” 47 Mrs. Trollope, writing in 1832, tells 
of “a young German gentleman of perfectly good manners” who 
“offended one of the principal families ... by having pronounced 
the word corset before the ladies of it.” 48 The word woman, in those 
sensitive days, became a term of reproach, comparable to the German 
mensch: the uncouth female took its place. 49 In the same way the 
legs of the fair became limbs and their breasts bosoms, and lady 
was substituted for wife. Stomach, then under the ban in England, 
was transformed, by some unfathomable magic, into a euphemism 
denoting the whole region from the nipples to the pelvic arch. It was 
during this time that the newspapers invented such locutions as 
interesting (or delicate ) condition, criminal operation, house of ill 
(or questionable) repute, disorderly-house, sporting-house, statutory 
offense, fallen woman, felonious attach, serious charge, and criminal 
assault. Servant girls ceased to be seduced, and began to be be¬ 
trayed. Syphilis became transformed into blood-poison, specific 
blood-poison and secret disease, and it and gonorrhea into social 
diseases. Various French terms, enceinte and accouchement among 
them, were imported to conceal the fact that careless wives occa¬ 
sionally became pregnant and had lyings-in. 

White, between 1867 and 1870, launched several attacks upon these 
ludicrous gossamers of speech, and particularly upon enceinte, limb 
and female, but only female succumbed. The passage of the Corn- 
stock Postal Act, in 1873, greatly stimulated the search for euphe¬ 
misms. Once that amazing law was upon the statute-book and Com¬ 
stock himself was given the inquisitorial powers of a post-office in¬ 
spector, it became positively dangerous to print certain ancient and 
essentially decent English words. To this day the effects of that old 
reign of terror are still visible. We yet use toilet, retimng-room and 
public comfort station in place of better terms, 50 and such idiotic 

47 John Graham Brooks: As Others See Us; New York, 1908, p. 11. 

48 Domestic Manners of the Americans, 2 vols.; London, 1832; vol. i, p. 132. 

49 Female, of course, was epidemic in England too, but White says that it 
was “not a Briticism,” and so early as 1839 the Legislature of Maryland ex¬ 
punged it from the title of a bill “to protect the reputation of unmarried 
females ,” substituting women, on the ground that female “was an Americanism 
in that application.” 

“ The French pissoir, for instance, is still regarded as indecent in America, 
and is seldom used in England, but it has gone into most of the Continental 
languages, though the French themselves avoid it in print, and use the inane 


AMERICAN AND ENGLISH TODAY 


153 


forms as red-light district, disorderly-house, social disease and white 
slave ostensibly conceal what every flapper is talking about. The 
word cadet, having a foreign smack and an innocent native meaning, 
is preferred to the more accurate procurer; even prostitutes shrink 
from the forthright pimp, and employ a characteristic American ab¬ 
breviation, P. I. —a curious brother to 8. 0. B. and 2 o’clock. Never¬ 
theless, a movement toward honesty is getting on its legs. The vice 
crusaders, if they have accomplished nothing else, have at least forced 
many of the newspapers to use the honest terms, syphilis, prostitute 
and venereal disease, albeit somewhat gingerly. It is, perhaps, sig¬ 
nificant of the change going on that the New York Evening Post 
recently authorized its reporters to use street-walker , 51 But in cer¬ 
tain quarters the change is viewed with alarm, and curious traces of 
the old prudery still survive. The Department of Health of New 
l"ork City lately announced that its efforts to diminish venereal 
disease were much handicapped because “in most newspaper 
offices the w 7 ords syphilis and gonorrhea are still tabooed, and 
without the use of these terms it is almost impossible to correctly 
state the problem.” The Army Medical Corps, in the early part 
of 1918, encountered the same difficulty: most newspapers refused 
to print its bulletins regarding venereal disease in the army. One 
of the newspaper trade journals thereupon sought the opinions of 
editors upon the subject, and all of them save one declared against 
the use of the two words. One editor put the blame upon the Post- 
office, which still cherishes the Comstock tradition. Another reported 
that “at a recent conference of the Scripps Northwest League edi¬ 
tors” it was decided that “the use of such terms as gonorrhea, syph¬ 
ilis, and even venereal diseases would not add to the tone of the 
papers, and that the term vice diseases can be readily substituted.” 52 
The Scripps papers are otherwise anything but distinguished for 
their “tone,” but in this department they yield to the Puritan habit. 

Vespasien in place of it. But all the Continental languages have their euphe¬ 
misms. Most of them, for example, use W. C., an abbreviation of the English 
water-closet, as a euphemism. The whole subject of national pruderies, in both 
act and speech, remains to be investigated. 

61 Even the Springfield Republican, the last stronghold of Puritan Kultur. 
printed the word on Oct. 11, 1917, in a review of New Adventures, by Michael 
Monahan. 

52 Pep, July, 1918, p. 8 


154 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


They are not alone; even some of the New York papers remain 
squeamish. On April 29, 1919, for example, the New York Tribune 
printed an article quoting with approbation a declaration by Major 
W. A. Wilson, of the Division of Venereal Control in the Merchant 
Marine, that “the only way to carry on the campaign ( i. e., against 
venereal disease) is to look the evil squarely in the face and fight it 
openly,” and yet the word venereal was carefully avoided throughout 
the article, save in the place where Major Wilson’s office was men¬ 
tioned. Whereupon a medical j ournal made the following comment: 

The words “the only way to carry on the campaign is to look the evil squarely 
in the face and fight it openly” are true, but how has the Tribune met the situa¬ 
tion? Its subhead speaks of preventable disease; in the first paragraph social 
diseases are mentioned; elsewhere it alludes to certain dangerous diseases, com¬ 
municable diseases and diseases, but nowhere in the entire article does it come 
out with the plain and precise designation of syphilis and gonorrhea as venereal 
diseases. The height of absurdity is reached in the Tribune’s last paragraph. 
Presumably it wants to say that venereals are being kept in France until cured; 
blit being too polite to say what it means, it makes a very sweeping statement 
indeed. Flat feet are a preventable disease, but the Tribune can hardly sup¬ 
pose that no soldier with flat feet is allowed to return home until he has been 
cured. 53 

Alas, even medical men yet show some of the old prudery. I am 
informed by Dr. Morris Fishbein, of the Journal of the American 
Medical Association, that not a few of them, in communications to 
their colleagues, still state the fact that a patient has syphilis by 
saying that he has a specific stomach or a specific ulcer, and that the 
Journal lately received a paper discussing the question, “Can a 
positive woman have a negative baby?”— i.e., can a woman with a 
positive Wassermann, indicating syphilis, have a baby free from the 
disease ? But a far more remarkable example of American prudery— 
this time among laymen—came to my notice in Philadelphia some 
years ago. A one-act play of mine, “The Artist,” was presented at 
the Little Theatre there, and during its run, on February 26, 1916, 
the Public Ledger reprinted some of the dialogue. One of the char¬ 
acters in the piece is A Virgin. At every occurrence a change 
was made to A Young Girl. Apparently, even virgin is still re- 

58 Social Hygiene Bulletin, May, 1919, p. 7. 


AMERICAN AND ENGLISH TODAY 


155 


garded as too frank in Philadelphia. 54 Fifty years ago the word 
decent was indecent in the South: no respectable woman was sup¬ 
posed to have any notion of the difference between decent and inde¬ 
cent. To this day many essentially harmless words and phrases 
are avoided in conversation because they have acquired obscene sig¬ 
nificances. The adjective knocked up, so common in England, means 
pregnant in America, and is thus not used politely. American women 
use unwell in a certain indelicate significance, and hence avoid its 
use generally. In Kansas, I am informed, even bag is under the 
ban; when they hear it out there they always think of scrotum. 55 

In their vocabularies of opprobrium and profanity English and 
Americans diverge sharply. The English mucker, rotter and blighter 
are practically unknown in America, save in college slang, 
and there are various American equivalents that are never 
heard in England. A guy, in the American vulgate, sim¬ 
ply signifies a man; there is not necessarily any disparag¬ 
ing significance. But in English, high or low, it means one 
who is making a spectacle of himself. When G. K. Chesterton toured 
the United States, in 1920-21, “some reporter in the West referred to 
him as a regular guy. At first Mr. Chesterton was for going after 
the fellow with a stick. Certainly a topsy-turvy land, the United 
States, where you can’t tell opprobrium from flattering compli¬ 
ment.” 56 The American derivative verb, to guy, is unknown in 
English; its nearest equivalent is to spoof, which is used in the United 
States only as a conscious Briticism. The average American, I be¬ 
lieve, has a larger profane vocabulary than the average Englishman, 
and swears rather more, but he attempts an amelioration of many 
of his oaths by softening them to forms with no apparent meaning. 
Dam (= dem = durn) for damn is apparently of English origin, 
but it is heard ten thousand times in America to once in England. 

m Perhaps the Quaker influence is to blame. At all events, Philadelphia is 
the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world. 
Early in 1918, when a patriotic moving-picture entitled “To Hell with the 
Kaiser” was sent on tour under government patronage, the word hell was 
carefully toned down, on the Philadelphia billboards, to h -. 

55 1 do not go into nursery euphemisms. They are very numerous, and de¬ 
serve investigation. It is my observation that they differ considerably in 
different parts of the country. 

“Murray Hill Bids Mr. Chesterton Goodby, Bookman , June 21, 1921, p. 309. 



156 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


So is dog-gone. Such euphemistic written forms as damphool, helluva 
and damfino are also far more common in this country. 57 All-fired 
for hell-fired, gee-whiz for Jesus, tarnal for eternal, tarnation for 
damnation, cuss for curse, holy gee for holy Jesus, cussword for 
curse-ward, goldamed for God-damned, by gosh for by God, great 
Scott for great God, and what’ell for what the hell are all Ameri¬ 
canisms; Thornton has traced all-fired to 1835, tarnation to 1801 
and tarnal to 1790; Tucker says that blankety is also American. 
By golly has been found in England so early as 1843, but it prob¬ 
ably originated in America; down to the Civil War it was the char¬ 
acteristic oath of the negro slaves. Such terms as bonehead, pinhead 
and boob have been invented, perhaps, to take the place of the Eng¬ 
lish ass, which has a flavor of impropriety in America on account of 
its identity in sound with the American pronunciation of arse. 58 At 
an earlier day ass was always differentiated by making it jackass. 

An English correspondent, resident in the United States for half 
a dozen years, tells me that many American expletives seem to 
him to be of Irish origin. Son-of-a-bitch, and its euphemistic Amer¬ 
ican daughter, somof-a-gun, are very seldom heard in England. 
“True oaths,” says this correspondent, “are rather rare among the 
English. There are a number of ugly words, probably descendants 
of true religious oaths, and a few that are merely dirty, but beyond 
that practically nothing. Sound rather than significance, it appears, 
gives a word evil qualities. Men have been put in jail for using 
meaningless words. There is, however, the same tendency to euphe¬ 
mism as in America. Just as God damn becomes gol dam here, 
Christ becomes crikey there. God damn is obsolescent in England, 
and Englishmen say ‘I don’t care a damn’ much more often than ‘I 
don’t give a damn.’ Jesus is never used as an oath, and I never 

ST Both of the great American telegraph companies have rules strictly for¬ 
bidding the acceptance of telegrams containing profane words. Some time ago a 
telegram of mine containing the harmless adjective damndest was refused by 
both. I appealed to the higher authorities of the Western Union. After I had 
solemnly filed a brief in defense of the term, Mr. T. W. Carroll, general manager 
of the Eastern Division, as solemnly decided that the company “must take 
the position that, if there is any question or doubt on the subject, the safest 
plan is to request the sender to so modify his language as to make his message 
acceptable.” In other words, any locution which happens to scratch the prudery 
of a telegraph clerk (however imbecile) must be omitted. 

58 Cf. R. M. Bache: Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech; Phila., 1869, p. 


AMERICAN AND ENGLISH TODAY 


157 


met any of the charming ones beginning with ‘Holy, jumping, bandy¬ 
legged, sacrificing . . .’ until I came to America. A Trinity Col¬ 
lege man here tells me the Irish don’t say Jesus; but he is the 
son of a schoolmaster. Without Jesus there could he no bejabers. 
In England, as I say, damn usually stands alone. God damn seemed 
as quaint as egad or odsbloed when I heard it first. I had climbed 
into a hayloft without a ladder, and my dear father remarked that 
one of these days I would break my God damned neck. I think my 
father, too, realized the quaintness of the oath; usually he, like any 
Englishman, would have said bloody. The word Christer has two 
meanings in England. It is used by printers to designate an ex¬ 
clamation point, and by other people in a sense which I can best 
explain by illustration. A Harvard professor, an Englishman, was 
discussing a certain English journalist then in this country, and he 
said to me: ‘Oh, he’s a simply fearful Christer; preaches in chapel 
every Sunday, and all that.’ ” Dirt, to designate earth, and closet, 
in the sense of a cupboard, are seldom used by an Englishman. The 
former always suggests filth to him, and the latter has obtained the 
limited sense of water-closet. 

But the most curious disparity between the profane vocabulary 
of the two tongues is presented by bloody. This word is entirely 
without improper significance in America, but in England it is 
regarded as the vilest of indecencies. The sensation produced in 
London when George Bernard Shaw put it into the mouth of a 
woman character in his play, “Pygmalion,” will be remembered. 
“The interest in the first English performance,” said the New York 
Times , 59 “centered in the heroine’s utterance of this banned word. 
It was waited for with trembling, heard shudderingly, and pre¬ 
sumably, when the shock subsided, interest dwindled.” But in New 
York, of course, it failed to cause any stir. Just why it is regarded 
as profane and indecent by the English is one of the mysteries of 
the language. It came in during the latter half of the seventeenth 
century, and remained innocuous for 200 years. Then it suddenly 
acquired its present abhorrent significance. Two etymologies have 
been proposed for it. By the one it is held to be synonymous with 

68 April 14, 1914. In 1920 the English Licenser of Stage Plays ordered 
bloody expunged from a play dealing with labor. Cf. English, Oct., 1920, p. 403. 


158 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


“in the manner of a blood” i. e., of a rich young roisterer; this 
would make bloody drunk equivalent to as dnink as a lord. The 
other derives it from by our Lady. eo But both theories obviously 
fail to account for its present disrepute. As drunk as a lord would 
certainly not offend English susceptibilities, and neither would by 
our Lady. An Englishwoman once tcjd me that it grated upon 
her ears because it somehow suggested catamenia; perhaps this af¬ 
fords a clue to the current aversion to it among the polite. It is 
used incessantly by the English lower classes; they have even in¬ 
vented an intensive, bleeding. So familiar has it become, in fact, 
that it is a mere counter-word, without intelligible significance. A 
familiar story illustrates this. Two Yorkshire miners are talking. 
“What do they mean,” asks one, “by one man, one vote ?” “Why,” 
is the reply, “it means one bloody man, one bloody vote.” 61 

So far no work devoted wholly to the improper terms of English 
and American has been published, but this lack will soon be rem¬ 
edied by a compilation made by a Chicago journalist, the late Henry 
ET. Cary. It is entitled “The Slang of Yenery and Its Analogues,” 
and runs to two large volumes. A small edition, mimeographed for 
private circulation, was issued in 1916. I have examined this w T ork 
and found it of great value. 

00 Swift, in his Journal to Stella, says: “It grows by V Lady cold, and I 
have no waistcoat on.” 

“An English correspondent calls my attention to the fact that bloody first 
attained to its present gross disrepute in England at the time of the Oscar 
Wilde trial, and suggests that the circumstance may have some significance. 


V. 


INTERNATIONAL EXCHANGES 

1 . 

Americanisms in England 

More than once, during the preceding chapters, we encountered 
Americanisms that had gone over into English, and English locu¬ 
tions that had begun to get a foothold in the United States. Such ex¬ 
changes are made frequently and often very quickly, and though the 
guardians of English, as we saw in Chapter I, Section 3, still attack 
every new Americanism vigorously, even when, as in the case of 
scientist, it is obviously sound, or, as in the case of joy-ride, it is ir¬ 
resistibly picturesque, they are often routed by public pressure, and 
have to submit in the end with the best grace possible. 

For example, consider caucus. It originated in Boston at some 
indeterminate time before 1750, and remained so peculiarly Ameri¬ 
can for more than a century following that most of the English 
visitors before the Civil War remarked its use. But, according to 
J. Redding Ware, 1 it began to creep into English political slang about 
1870, and in the 80’s it was lifted to good usage by the late Joseph 
Chamberlain. Ware, writing in the first years of the present cen¬ 
tury, said that the word had become “very important” in England, 
but was “not admitted into dictionaries.” But in the Concise Ox¬ 
ford Dictionary, dated 1914, and in Cassell’s New English Dic¬ 
tionary, published five years later, it is given as a sound English 
word, though its American origin is noted. The English, however, 
use it in a sense that has become archaic in America, thus pre¬ 
serving an abandoned American meaning in the same way that many 
abandoned British meanings have been preserved on this side. In the 

1 Passing English of the Victorian Era; London, n. d., p. 68. 

159 


160 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


United States the word means, and has meant for years, a meeting of 
some division, large or small, of a political or legislative body for 
the purpose of agreeing upon a united course of action in the main 
assembly. In England it means the managing committee of a party 
or faction—something corresponding to our national committee, or 
state central committee, or steering committee, or to the half-for- 
gotten congressional caucuses of the 20’s. It has a disparaging sig¬ 
nificance over there, almost equal to that of our words organization 
and machine. Moreover, it has given birth to two derivatives of 
like quality, both unknown in America— caucusdom, meaning ma¬ 
chine control, and caucuser, meaning a machine politician. 2 

A good many other such Americanisms have got into good usage 
in England, and new ones are being exported constantly. Farmer 
describes the process of their introduction and assimilation. Amer¬ 
ican books, newspapers and magazines, especially the last, circulate 
in England in large number, and some of their characteristic locu¬ 
tions strike the English fancy and are repeated in conversation. 
Then they get into print, and begin to take on respectability. “The 
phrase, ‘as the Americans say/” he continues, “might in some 
cases be ordered from the type foundry as a logotype, so frequently 
does it do introduction duty.” 3 Ware shows another means of 
ingress: the argot of sailors. Many of the Americanisms he notes 
as having become naturalized in England, e. g., hoodie, boost and 
walk-out, are credited to Liverpool as a sort of half-way station. 
Travel brings in still more: England swarms with Americans, and 
Englishmen themselves, visiting America, are struck by the new and 
racy phrases that they hear, and afterward take them home and try 
them on their friends. The English authors who burden every west¬ 
bound ship, coming here to lecture, have especially sharp ears for 

a The Concise Oxford Dictionary and Cassell, following the late J. H. Trum¬ 
bull, the well-known authority on Indian languages, derive the word from the 
Algonquin oau-cau-as-u or kau>kaw-asu, one who advises. But most other 
authorities, following Pickering, derive it from oaulkers. The first caucuses, it 
would appear, were held in a caulkers’ shop in Boston, and were called oaulkers’ 
meetings. The Rev. William Gordon, in his History of the Rise and Inde¬ 
pendence of the United States, Including the Late War, published in London 
in 1788, said that “more than fifty years ago Mr. Samuel Adams’ father and 
twenty others, one or two from the north end of the town [Boston], where the 
ship business is carried on, used to meet, make a caucus and lay their plans 
for introducing certain persons into places of trust and power.” 

* Americanisms Old and New; p. vii. 


INTERNATIONAL EXCHANGES 


161 


such neologisms, and always use them when they get home—often, as 
we shall see, inaccurately. Dickens was the first of these visitors to 
carry back that sort of cargo; according to Bishop Coxe 4 he gave 
currency in England, in his “American Notes,” to reliable, influen¬ 
tial, talented and lengthy. Bristed, writing in 1855, said that 
talented was already firmly fixed in the English vocabulary by that 
time. All four words are in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and only 
lengthy is noted as “originally an Americanism.” Cassell lists them 
without any remark at all; they have been thoroughly assimilated. 
Finally, there is the influence of American plays and moving pic¬ 
tures. Hundreds of American films are shown in England every 
week, and the American words and phrases appearing in their titles, 
sub-titles and other explanatory legends thus become familiar to 
the English. “The patron of the picture palace,” says W. G. Faulk¬ 
ner, in an article in the London Daily Mail, “learns to think of 
his railway station as a depot; he has alternatives to one of our new¬ 
est words, hooligan, in hoodlum, and tough; he watches a dive, which 
is a thieves’ kitchen or a room in which bad characters meet, and 
whether the villain talks of dough or sugar he knows it is money to 
which he is referring. The musical ring of the word tramp gives 
way to the stodgy hobo or dead-beat. It may be that the plot reveals 
an attempt to deceive some simple-minded person. If it does, the 
innocent one is spoken of as a sucker, a come-on, a boob, or a lobster 
if he is stupid in the bargain.” 

Mr. Faulkner goes on to say that a great many other American¬ 
isms are constantly employed by Englishmen “who have not been af¬ 
fected by the avalanche . . . which has come upon us through the 
picture palace.” “Thus today,” he says, “we hear people speak of 
the fall of the year, a stunt they have in hand, their desire to boost 
a particular business, a peach when they mean a pretty girl, a scab — 
a common term among strikers—the glad-eye, junk when they mean 
worthless material, their efforts to make good, the elevator in the 
hotel or office, the boss or manager, the crook or swindler; and they 
will tell you that they have the goods —that is, they possess the requi¬ 
site qualities for a given position.” The venerable Frederic Harri- 

* A. Cleveland Coxe: Americanisms in England, Forum, Oct., 1886. 


162 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


son, writing in the Fortnightly Review in the Spring of 1018, de¬ 
nounced this tendency with a vigor recalling the classical an¬ 
athemas of Dean Alford and Sydney Smith. 5 “Stale American 
phrases, . . . ” he said, “are infecting even our higher journalism 
and our parliamentary and platform oratory. ... A statesman is 
now out for victory; he is up against pacificism. . . . He has a card 
up his sleeve, by which the enemy are at last to he euchred. Then a 
fierce fight in which hundreds of noble fellows are mangled or drowned 
is a scrap. ... To criticise a politician is to call for his scalp. 
. . . The other fellow is beaten to a frazzled’ And so on. “Bol¬ 
shevism,” concluded Harrison sadly, “is ruining language as well 
as society.” Other watchmen have often sounded the same alarm, 
sometimes in very acrimonious terms. “Thou callest trousers pants,” 
roared Samuel Butler in his “Psalm to Montreal,” “whereas I call 
them trousers; therefore thou art in hell-fire and may the Lord pity 
thee!” 6 

But though there are many such protests, the majority of English¬ 
men make borrowings from the tempting and ever-widening Ameri¬ 
can vocabulary, and many of these loan-words take root, and are 
presently accepted as sound English, even by the most squeamish. 
The Cambridge History of English Literature lists backwoodsman, 
know-nothing and yellow-back as English compounds, apparently 
in forgetfulness of their American origin, and adds skunk, 
squaw and toboggan as direct importations from the Indian 
tongues, without noting that they came through American, 
and remained definite Americanisms for a long while. 7 It even 
adds musquash, a popular* name for the Fiber zibethicus, borrowed 
from the Algonquin muskwessu but long since degenerated to musk¬ 
rat in America. Musquash has been in disuse in this country, in¬ 
deed, since the middle of the last century, save as a stray localism, 
but the English have preserved it, and it appears in the Oxford 
Dictionary. 8 

5 Reprinted, in part, in the New York Sun , May 12, 1918. 

8 The Note-Books of Samuel Butler; New York, 1917, p. 389. 

7 Vol. xiv, pp. 507, 512. 

8 In this connection it is curious to note that, though the raccoon is an animal 
quite unknown in England, there was, during the Great War, a destroyer 
called the Raccoon in the British Navy. This ship was lost with all hands off 
the Irish coast, Jan. 9, 1918. 


INTERNATIONAL EXCHANGES 


163 


A few weeks in London or a month’s study of the London news¬ 
papers will show a great many other American pollutions of the 
well of English. The argot of politics is full of them. Many be¬ 
sides caucus were introduced by Joseph Chamberlain, a politician 
skilled in American campaign methods and with an American wife 
to prompt him. He gave the English their first taste of to belittle, 
one of the inventions of Thomas Jefferson. Graft and to graft 
crossed the ocean in their nonage. To bluff has been well understood 
in English for 30 years. It is in Cassell’s and the Oxford Dic¬ 
tionaries, and has been used by no less a magnifico than Sir Almroth- 
Wright. 9 To stump, in the form of stump-oratory, is in Carlyle’s 
“Latter-Day Pamphlets,” published in 1850, and caucus appears 
in his “Frederick the Great,” 10 though, as we have seen on the 
authority of Ware, it did not come into general use in England 
until ten years later. Buncombe (usually spelled bunkum ) is in all 
the later English dictionaries. Gerrymander is in H. G. Wells’ “Out¬ 
line of History.” 11 In the London stock market and among English 
railroad men various characteristic Americanisms have got a foot¬ 
hold. The meaning of bucket-shop and to water, for example, is 
familiar to every London broker’s clerk. English trains are now 
telescoped and carry dead-lieads, and in 1913 a rival to the Amalga¬ 
mated Order of Railway Servants was organized under the name 
of the Hational Union of Railway Men. The beginnings of a move¬ 
ment against the use of servant are visible in other directions, and 
the American help threatens to be substituted; at all events, Help 
Wanted advertisements are now occasionally encountered in Eng¬ 
lish newspapers. But it is American verbs that seem to find the way 
into English least difficult, particularly those compounded with prep¬ 
ositions and adverbs, such as to pan out and to swear off. Most of 

9 The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage; London, 1913, p. 9. 
To bluff has also gone into other languages. During the Cuban revolution of 
March, 1917, the newspapers of Havana, objecting to the dispatches sent out by 
American correspondents, denounced the latter as los blofistas. It has also got 
into German, and has been used in a formal speech by Herr von Bethmann- 
Hollweg. Meanwhile, to bluff was once shouldered out in the country of its 
origin,°at least temporarily, by a verb borrowed from the French, to camouflage. 
This first appeared in the Spring of 1917. It was, however, quickly done to 
death, and so to bluff was revived. 

10 Book iv, ch. iii. The first of the six volumes was published in 1858 and 
the last in 1865. 

11 Vol. i, p. 496; New York, 1920. 


164 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


them, true enough, are still used as conscious Americanisms, hut 
used they are, and with increasing frequency. The highly typical 
American verb to loaf is now naturalized, and Ware says that The 
Loaferies is one of the common nicknames of the Whitechapel work- 
house. Both the Concise Oxford and Cassell list to loaf without men¬ 
tioning its American origin. The former says that its etymology is 
“dubious” and the latter that it is “doubtful.” 

It is curious, reading the fulminations of American purists of the 
last generation, to note how many of the Americanisms they de¬ 
nounced have not only got into perfectly good usage at home but even 
broken down all guards across the ocean. To placate and to antago¬ 
nize are examples. The Concise Oxford and Cassell distinguish be¬ 
tween the English and American meanings of the latter: in Eng¬ 
land a man may antagonize only another man, in America he may 
antagonize a mere idea or thing. But, as the brothers Fowler show, 
even the English meaning is of American origin, and no doubt a 
few more years will see the verb completely naturalized in Britain. 
To placate, attacked vigorously by all native grammarians down to 
(but excepting) White, now has the authority of the Spectator, 
and is accepted by Cassell. To donate is still under the ban, but 
other old bugaboos that have been embraced are gubernatorial, 
presidential and standpoint. White labored long and valiantly 
to convince Americans that the adjective derived from president 
should be without the i before its last syllable, following the example 
of incidental, regimental, monumental, governmental, oriental, ex¬ 
perimental and so on; but in vain, for presidential is now perfectly 
good English. To engineer, to collide, to comer, to obligate, and to 
lynch are in Cassell with no hint of their American origin, and so 
are home-spun, out-house, cross-purposes, green-horn, blizzard, 
tornado, cyclone, hurricane, excursionist, wash-stand and wash¬ 
basin, though wash-hand-stand and wash-hand-basin are also given. 
To boom, to boost and to boss are listed as Americanisms; so are 
highfalutin, skeedaddle and flat-footed. But to donate and to feature 
are not there at all, and neither are non-committal, bay-window, 
semi-occasional, square-meal, bach-number, spondulix, back-yard, 
stag-party, derby (hat) and trained-nurse. Drug-store is making 
its way in England; the firm known as Botts Cash Chemists 



INTERNATIONAL EXCHANGES 


165 


uses tlie term to designate its branches. But it is not yet listed 
by either Cassell or the Concise Oxford, though both give drug¬ 
gist. L. Pearsall Smith adds platform (political), interview, faith¬ 
healing, co-education and cake-walk. 12 Cassell says that letter-car¬ 
rier is obsolete in England and that pay-day is used only on the 
Stock Exchange there. Tenderfoot is creeping in, though the Eng¬ 
lish commonly mistake it for an Australianism; it is used by the 
English Boy Scouts just as our own Boy Scouts use it. Scalawag, 
characteristically, has got into English with an extra l, making it 
scallawag. Rambunctious is not in any of the new English diction¬ 
aries, but in Cassell I find rumbustious, probably its father. 

So many Americanisms, in fact, have gone into English of late 
that the English have begun to lose sight of the transoceanic origin 
of large numbers of them. When the last edition of the present 
work was published some of the English reviewers made lists of such 
Americanisms that had ousted or begun to oust their English equiv¬ 
alents, for example, sweater for jersey, overcoat for greatcoat, scarf- 
pin for tie-pin, subway for underground, homely for plain, fall for 
autumn, rare for underdone, and blizzard, cyclone, tornado and hurri¬ 
cane for storm. A number of these terms, of course, were sound old 
English, but the point is that they had been preserved in good usage 
in the United States during a time, often extending to more than 
a century, which saw their exile to dialects or to the vulgar speech 
in England, and that their revival was due solely to American influ¬ 
ence. Even so, many of them retained a good deal of foreignness, 
as was revealed by an obvious difference of opinion as to the extent 
of their acceptance, and their right to it. It is, in fact, easy to 
overestimate the importance of such exportations, and of the 
transient slang-phrases that go with them. It usually takes a long 
while for one of them to become naturalized in England, and even 
then the business is sometimes achieved only at the cost of a change 
in meaning or spelling. To the Englishman, indeed, most Ameri¬ 
canisms continue to show an abhorrent quality, even after he has be¬ 
gun to use them; he never feels quite at ease in their use, and so he 

13 English, Oct., 1919, p. 177. He also adds table-turning and yellow-press. 
The first is a characteristic modification of the American table-tapping and the 
latter of yellow-journalism. See also Words on Trial, by T. Michael Pope, 
English , Sept., 1919, pp. 150-1. 


166 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


seldom uses them correctly. When, a few years ago, the English bor¬ 
rowed the highly characteristic American phrase, I should worry 
(probably borrowed by American, in turn, from the Yiddish), they 
changed it absurdly into I should not worry. In the same way they 
confused the tw T o Americanisms, gink and jinx, and so produced the 
bastard ginx. 13 Perhaps their inability to understand the generality 
of Americanisms or to enter naturally into the spirit of the language 
helps to explain the common American notion that they are dull-pated 
and unable to appreciate a joke. Certain it is that very few of their 
authors, even after the most careful preparation, show any capacity 
for writing American in a realistic manner. A proof of it is of¬ 
fered by the English novelist, W. L. George, in a chapter entitled 
“Litany of the Novelist” in his book of criticism, “Literary Chap¬ 
ters.” 14 George has been in the United States, knows many Ameri¬ 
cans, and is here addressing Americans and trying to help out their 
comprehension by a studied use of purely American phrases. One 
hears, not of the East End, but of the East Side; not of the City, 
but of Wall Street; not of Belgravia or the West End, but of Fifth 
avenue; not of howler hats, but of derbys; not of idlers in pubs, 
but of saloon loafers; not of pounds, shillings and pence, but of dol¬ 
lars and cents. In brief, a gallant attempt upon a strange tongue, 
and by a writer of the utmost skill—but a hopeless failure none the 
less. In the midst of his best American, George drops into Briticism 
after Briticism, some of them quite as unintelligible to the average 
American reader as so many Gallicisms. On page after page they 
display the practical impossibility of the enterprise: hack-garden for 
hack-yard, perambulator for baby-carriage, corn-market for grain- 
market, coal-owner for coal-operator, post for mail, and so on. And 
to top them there are English terms that have no American equiva¬ 
lents at all, for example, kitchen-fender. In other chapters of the 
same book his blunders are even worse: petrol and cruet most cer¬ 
tainly puzzle many of his American readers. 

Nor is he alone. Every English author who attempts to render 
the speech of American characters makes a mess of it. H. G. Wells’ 
American in “Mr. Britling Sees It Through” is only matched by 

11 English, Sept., 1919, p. 151. 

14 Boston, 1918, pp. 1-43. 


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G. K. Chesterton’s in “Man Alive.” Even Kipling, who submitted 
the manuscript of “Captains Courageous” to American friends for 
criticism, yet managed to make an American in it say “He’s by way 
of being a fisherman now.” The late Frank M. Bicknell once 
amassed some amusing examples of this unanimous failing. 15 Max 
Pemberton, in a short story dealing with an American girl’s visit to 
England, makes her say: “I’m right glad. . . . You’re as pale as 
spectres, I guess. . . . Fancy that, now! ... You are my guest, I 
reckon, . . . and here you are, my word!” C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne, in 
depicting a former American naval officer, makes him speak of saloon- 
comer men (comer-loafers?) . E. W. Hornung, in one of his “Raf¬ 
fles” stories, introduces an American prize-fighter who' goes to Lon¬ 
don and regales the populace with such things as these: “Blamed 
if our Bowery boys ain’t cock-angels to scum like this. . . . By the 
holy tinker! . . . Blight and blister him! . . . I guess I’ll punch 
his face into a jam pudding. . . . Say, sonny, I like you a lot, but 
I sha’n’t like you if you’re not a good boy.” The American use of 
way and away seems to have daunted many of the authors quoted by 
Mr. Bicknell; several of them agree on forms that are certainly never 
heard in the United States. Thus H. B. Marriott Watson makes an 
American character say: “You ought to have done business with me 
away in Chicago,” and Walter Frith makes another say: “He has 
gone way off to Holbom,” “I stroll a block or two way down the 
Strand,” “I’ll drive him way down home by easy stages,” and “He 
can pack his grip and be way off home.” Even worse are the 
attempts at American made by English writers upon lower planes. 
Here, for example, is the effort of the advertising agent of the 
Morris motor car (prefaced by the rather cryptic note: “In view 
of the fact that the famous Morris car is now being sold at low 
‘American’ prices, we have ventured to put our advertisement into 
the American language”) : 

Say, bud, jest haow do you calculate to buy an automobile? Do you act 
pensive after you’ve bought, or do you let a few facts form fours on your grey 
matter before you per-mit the local car agent to take a hack at your bank 
balance? 

F’rinstance, what horse-power class do you aim to get into? Will your 
pocket bear a 20 h.p., and, if not, will a 10 h.p. bear your family? That’s 

15 The Yankee in British Fiction, Outlook, Nov. 19, 1910. 


168 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


the first problem, and the best way to answer it is to think what old friend 
Solomon would have done and cut th’trouble in half by making your car an 
11.9—safe both ways up. 

Wal, after you’ve laid out your cash an’ folded its arms on its little chest, 
there are just two people who are liable to hold you up for ransom; the tax- 
collector and th’polisman. Per-sonally, I give a polisman just nuthin’ and a 
tax-collector as little as George and Mary will let me. If I’m in the 11.9 
h.p. class I can send the kids to school with th’tax balance. Get me? 

Then, son, as the principal dooty of an auto is to shift th’scenery along 
quick without burning too much gas, and without letting little old Experience 
teach you why “swearing” rhymes with “bearing,” y’want to buy something which 
everybody KNOWS to be the goods. Think of “Imshi” of The Daily Mail, with 
guts enough for a 20,000-mile trip at any speed over anythin’, with a petrol 
consumption of 35-40 m.p.g. and with no come-back in repairs. Get an 
“Imshi” of your own, an’ you’ll love the man who sold it you! 

Then y’want a comfortable auto. For though y’head may be solid ivory 
you are not built that way all over. Why does a hen-sparrow use hay for 
its nest? Get a Morris, with three-quarter elliptic substantial springs, all 
dolled up in leather gaiters, an’ th’potholes will never cause your hat to sit 
loose. Get a Morris, with light irrever-sible steering and an adjustable rake 
to it, an’ keep on good terms with your wrists. Get a Morris, with a gear- 
change that just flips over, an’ quit blushing. Get a Morris, with a self-starter 
that works, and save heart-disease. In other words, friend, get a Morris 
an’ get HAPPY! 

Then there’s material, bud. Y’can excuse a man buyin’ padding with his 
wife, but I do NOT see haow there’s any excuse for getting the wrong stuff 
In th’right place with an automobile. There’s th’Morris people with h 
Metallurgical Laboratory an’ physical an’ chemical tests which line up every 
bar and ingot coming into the factory, and with millimetre gauges that put 
an O.K. on every car-part before kissing it good-bye to the assembling-shop. 
Say, if those Morris people didn’t come from Oxford they’d come from Mis¬ 
souri, sure. 

Then, there’s natural beauty: th’Morris is a right handsome car that keeps 
on looking handsome; it makes less noise than a clam with ball-bearing shell- 
hinges; it accelerates like a greyhound with ten cawn-beef cans attached to its 
rudder. It is just too cute for anything. 19 

Various American critics have noted similar and even worse 
maulings of American in current English books and periodicals, 
and one of them, Miss Anna Branson Hillyard, once offered 
publicly in the Athenoeum 17 to undertake the revision of Eng¬ 
lish manuscripts for “fees carefully and inversely scaled by 
the consultant’s importance.” Miss Hillyard, in this article, 
cited a curious misunderstanding of American by the late 

19 Autocar, Feb. 4, 1922, p. 55. 

11 American Written Here, Dec. 19, 1919, p. 1362. 


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Rupert Brooke. When Brooke was in the United States he sent 
a letter to the Westminster Gazette containing the phrase “You 

bet your-.” The editor, unable to make anything of it, inserted 

the word boots in place of the dash. Brooke thereupon wrote a let¬ 
ter to a friend, Edward Marsh, complaining of this botching of his 
Americanism, and Marsh afterward printed it in his memoir of the 
poet. Miss Hillyard says that she was long puzzled by this alleged 
Americanism, and wondered where Brooke had picked it up. Fi¬ 
nally, “light dawned by way of a comic cartoon. It was the classic 
phrase, you betcha (accent heavily on the bet) which Brooke was 
spelling conventionally!” And, as Miss Hillyard shows, incor¬ 
rectly, as usual, for you betcha is not a collision form of “you bet 
your” but a collision form of “you bet you” —an imitative second 
person of “I bet you,” which in comic-cartoon circles is pronounced 
and spelled “I betcha.” 19, 

I doubt that the war aided very much in giving new currency to 
Americanisms among the English. The fact is that the American 
and British troops were seldom on the best of terms, and so frater¬ 
nized very little. Cassell’s New English Dictionary, published in 
1919, lists a number of words borrowed by the British from the 
Americans, among them cold-feet, delicatessen, guy (noun), high¬ 
brow, hobo, jitney, hot-stuff, jazz, joy-ride, milk-shake, movies, 
pronto, tangle-foot, to make good, to hike, and to frazzle, but not 
many of them were in general use. Cassell lists chautauquan but 
not chautauqua, and converts the American dub into dud. A corre¬ 
spondent who was an officer in the American army writes: 

I was with an American division brigaded with the British. The chief result 
seemed to be the adoption of a common unit of swearing, but probably even 
this had been arrived at independently. The passage of all the American troops 
that went through Liverpool, which was near-American before the war, didn’t 
make much difference. I had to get some shoes while I was on furlough there 
after the armistice, and although I was in my American uniform, a fact that 
should have made the nature of the shoes demanded doubly sure, they brought 
out a pair of low shoes. 

18 See also Novelists Far Afield, New York Evening Post (editorial). May 
6, 1919. To the Brooke anecdote a correspondent adds: “An Englishman, 
confronted by the puzzling American phrase, ‘Where am I at?’, interpreted it 
as a doubly barbarous form of ‘Where is me ’at?’” 



170 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


2 . 

Briticisms in the United States 

Nor did the American troops pick up many Briticisms during their 
year and a half in France, save temporarily. In an exhaustive and 
valuable vocabulary of soldiers’ slang compiled by E. A. Hecker and 
Edmund Wilson, Jr., I can find few words or phrases that seem 
to be certainly English in origin. To carry on retains in American 
its old American meaning of to raise a pother, despite its wide¬ 
spread use among the English in the sense of to he (in American) 
on the job . Even to wangle, perhaps the most popular of all the 
new verbs brought out of the war by the English, has never got a 
foothold in the United States, and would be unintelligible to nine 
Americans out of ten. Nor have we ever borrowed wowser, which 
the English got from the Australians. 

It is on far higher and less earthly planes that Briticisms make 
their entry into American, and are esteemed and cultivated. Be¬ 
cause the United States has failed to develop a native aristocracy 
of settled position and authority, there is still an almost universal 
tendency here, among folk of social pretensions, to defer to Eng¬ 
lish usage and opinion. 19 The English court, in fact, still remains 
the only fount of honor that such persons know, and its valuations 
of both men and customs take precedence of all native valuations. 
I can’t imagine any fashionable American who would not be glad 
to accept even so curious an English aristocrat as Lord Reading 
or Lord Birkenhead at his face value, and to put him at table above 
a United States Senator. This emulation is visible in all the minutise 
of social intercourse in America—in the hours chosen for meals, in 
the style of personal correspondence, in wedding customs, in the 
ceremonials incidental to entertaining, and in countless other direc¬ 
tions. It even extends to the use of the language. 20 We have seen 

19 The curious who desire to pursue this subject will find it discussed at 
greater length in the essay, The National Letters, in my Prejudices: Second 
Series; New York, 1920, and in my preface to The American Credo, by George 
Jean Nathan and me; New York, 1920. 

90 Sometimes this colonialism goes to amusing lengths. During the Summer of 
1921 a reviewer in the London Times was troubled by the word hick, used in a 
book by my associate, George Jean Nathan. At once an obscure American woman 



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how, even so early as Webster’s time, the intransigent Loyalists of 
what Scheie de Vere calls ‘‘Boston and the Boston dependencies” imi¬ 
tated the latest English fashions in pronunciation, and how this 
imitation continues to our own day. New York is but little behind, 
and with the affectation of what is regarded as English pronunciation 
there goes a constant borrowing of new English words and phrases, 
particularly of the sort currently heard in the West End of London. 
The small stores in the vicinity of Fifth avenue, for some years 
past, have all been turning themselves into shops. Shoes for the 
persons who shop in that region are no longer shoes, but boots, and 
they are sold by bootmakers in bootshops. One encounters, too, in 
Fifth avenue and the streets adjacent, a multitude of gift-shops, 
tea-shops, haberdashery-shops, book-shops, luggage-shops, hat-shops 
and print-shops. Every apartment-house in New York has a trades¬ 
mens entrance. To Let signs have become almost as common, at 
least in the East, as For Rent signs. Railway has begun to displace 
railroad . 21 Charwoman has been adopted all over the country, and 
we have begun to forget our native modification of char, to wit, 
chore. Long ago drawing-room was borrowed by the haul ton to 
take the place of parlor, and hired girls began to be maids. Whip 
for driver, stick for cane, top-hat for high-hat, and to tub for to 
bathe came in long ago, and guard has been making a struggle against 
conductor in New York for years. In August, 1917, signs appeared 
in the New York surface cars in which the conductors were referred 
to as guards; all of them are guards on the elevated lines and in the 
subways save the forward men, who remain conductors officially. In 
Charles street in Baltimore, some time ago, the proprietor of a fask- 

novelist, Roof by name, dispatched a letter to the Times, denouncing this hick as 
“middle class” slang from the West, hinting that such barbarisms were deliber¬ 
ately given circulation by “the German-speaking Jewish population of New 
York,” assuring the editor that her own ancestors “came to America in 1620,” 
and offering him a pledge that she would never cease to “adhere to the King’s 
English.” This letter, which appeared in the Times on July 14, was quoted 
with approbation by the Christian Science Monitor, the organ of New England 
Kultur, on Aug. 14. But already on July 21 the Times had printed a letter 
from William Archer showing that hick was actually perfectly sound English, 
and that it could be found in Steele’s comedy, “The Funeral.” Two weeks 
later, a Norwegian philologist, S. N. Baral, followed with a letter showing that 
hick was connected with the Anglo-Saxon haeg, indicating a menial or lout, and 
that it had cognates in all the ancient Teutonic languages, and even in Sanskrit! 

31 Evacustes A. Phipson, an Englishman, says in Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 432, 
that railway “appears to be a concession to Anglomania.” 


172 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


ionable stationery store directed me, not to the elevator hut to the 
lift. During the war even the government seemed inclined to sub¬ 
stitute the English hoarding for the American billboard. 22 In the 
Federal Reserve Act it actually borrowed the English governor to 
designate the head of a bank. 

The influence of the stage is largely responsible for the introduc¬ 
tion and propagation of such Briticisms. Of plays dealing with 
fashionable life, most of those seen in the United States are of Eng¬ 
lish origin, and many of them are played by English companies. 
Thus the social aspirants of the towns become familiar with the 
standard English pronunciation of the moment and with the current 
English phrases. It was by this route, I suppose, that old top and 
its analogues got in. The American actors, having no court to 
imitate, content themselves by imitating their English colleagues. 
Thus an American of fashionable pretensions, say in Altoona, Pa., 
or Athens, Ga., shakes hands, eats soup, greets his friends, enters a 
drawing-room and pronounces the words path, secretary, melancholy 
and necessarily in a manner that is an imitation of some American 
actor’s imitation of an English actor’s imitation of what is done in 
Mayfair—in brief, an imitation in the fourth degree. No wonder 
it is sometimes rather crude. This crudity is especially visible in 
speech habits. The American actor does his best to imitate the pro¬ 
nunciation and intonation of the English, but inasmuch as his name, 
before he became Gerald Cecil, was probably Rudolph Goetz or 
Terence Googan, he frequently runs upon laryngeal impossibili¬ 
ties. Here we have an explanation of the awful mess that society 
folk in Des Moines and Little Rock make of pronouncing the test 
words in the authentic English manner. All such words are fil¬ 
tered through Gaelic or Teutonic or Semitic gullets before they reach 
the ultimate consumer. 

The influence of the Protestant Episcopal Church is also to be 
taken into account. It was the center of Loyalism during the Revo¬ 
lution, and it has fostered a passionate and often excessive Anglo¬ 
mania ever since. In the larger American cities entrance into it 

** See p. 58 of The United States at War, a pamphlet issued by the Library 
of Congress, 1917. The compiler of this pamphlet was a savant bearing the fine 
old British name of Herman H. B. Meyer. 


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is the aim of all social pushers—including, of late, even the Jews 23 
—and once they get in they adopt, in so far as they are able, the 
terminology of its clergy, whose eagerness to appear English is tra¬ 
ditional. The fashionable preparatory schools for boys and finishing 
schools for girls, many of which are directly controlled by this sect, 
are also very active centers of Anglomania, and have firmly estab¬ 
lished such Briticisms as headmaster, varsity, chapel (for the service 
as well as the building), house-master, old boy, monitor, honors, 
prefect and form, at least in fashionable circles. The late Woodrow 
Wilson, during his term as president of Princeton, gave currency 
to various other English academic terms, including preceptor and 
quad, but most of the words died with his reforms. At such schools 
as Groton and Lawrenceville the classes are called forms, and 
efforts are made in other ways to imitate the speech of Eton and Har¬ 
row. Dr. J. Milnor Coit, while rector of the fashionable St. Paul’s 
School, at Concord, NT. H., gave a great impetus to this imitation of 
English manners. Says a leading authority on American private 
schools: “Dr. Coit encouraged cricket rather than baseball. The 
English schoolroom nomenclature, too, was here introduced to the 
American boy. St. Paul’s still has forms, but the removes, evensong 
and matins, and even the cricket of Dr. Coit’s time are now forgotten. 
Most boys of the three upper forms have separate rooms. The 


“Jews desiring to abandon Moses formerly embraced Christian Science, but 
of late the more wealthy of them have been taking bold headers into the 
Anglican communion, especially in New York. I am informed that St. Bar¬ 
tholomew’s Church, in the fashionable Park avenue, is their favorite. In a 
review of the last edition of the present work in the American Hebrew, March 
10, 1922, Rabbi David Philipson, of the Hebrew Union College at Cincinnati, 
said: “This reminds one of the story told of a Jewess who joined one of 

the most fashionable Episcopal churches in New York City. She was most 
assiduous in attending services on Sunday and in supporting the church 
charities. Of course, her chief reason for joining this church was to enter 
the exclusive social circles. She was disappointed in this because, despite 
her conscientious attendance at church services, she did not form the acquaint¬ 
ance of any of the aristocratic women in the congregation. She approached 
the rector and said to him that she had been a member of the church for 
some time, yet had not had the pleasure of meeting any of the members. The 
rector told her to remain after the service the following Sunday and he would 
be pleased to introduce her to one or more of his parishioners. As requested, 
she tarried after the service the next Sunday. To her amazement and chagrin 
the rector brought up to her for the purpose of introduction a woman whom 
she recognized as a former schoolmate in the religious school of a leading 
Jewish congregation of the city.” 


174 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


younger boys have alcoves in the dormitories similar to the cubicles 
of many of the English public schools.” 24 

Occasionally some uncompromising patriot raises his voice against 
such importations, but he seldom shows the vigorous indignation of 
the English purists. White, in 1'870, warned Americans against 
the figurative use of nasty as a synonym for disagreeable. The use 
of the word was then relatively new in England, though, according 
to White, the Saturday Review and the Spectator had already suc¬ 
cumbed. His objections to it were unavailing; nasty quickly got 
into American and has been there ever since. In 1883 Gilbert 
M. Tucker protested against good-form, traffic (in the sense of 
travel), to bargain and to tub as Briticisms that we might well do 
without, but all of them took root and are perfectly sound American 
today. The locutions that are more obviously merely fashionable 
slang have a harder time of it, and seldom gain lodgment. When 
certain advertisers in New York sought to appeal to snobs by using 
such Briticisms as swagger and topping in their advertisements, the 
town wits, led by the watchful Franklin P. Adams (though he then 
served the Tribune, which Clement K. Shorter once called “more 
English than we are English”), fell upon them, and qitickly routed 
them. To the average American of the plain people, indeed, any 
word or phrase of an obviously English flavor appears to be subtly 
offensive. To call him old dear would be almost as hazardous as to 
call him Claude or Clarence. He associates all such terms, and the 
English broad a no less, with the grotesque Britons he sees in bur¬ 
lesque shows. Perhaps this feeling entered into the reluctance of 
the American soldier to borrow British war slang. 

The grotesque errors which English authors fall into every time 
they write American, referred to a few pages back, are matched by 
the blunders of Americans who essay to write colloquial English. 
Some time ago, St. John Ervine, the Anglo-Irish playwright, dis¬ 
cussed the matter at length in Vanity Fair. 25 Thus his indignant 
protest: 

24 Porter E. Sargent: American Private Schools; Boston, 1920. It is curious 
to note that Dr. Coit, despite his Anglomania, was born in Harrisburg, Pa., 
began life as manager of a tube works at Cleveland, and retired to Munich 
on resigning the rectorate of St. Paul’s. 

25 June, 1922, p. 53. The title of the article was English Dialect and Ameri¬ 
can Ears. 


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175 


When I was in Chicago two years ago, I read in one of the newspapers of 
that city an account of a jewel theft which reflected very gravely on the 
efficiency of the reporter who wrote it. A young Englishman, belonging to 
the aristocracy, had married an American girl, and while they were on their 
honeymoon, thieves stole some of her jewels. A reporter hurried from Chicago 
to get a “story” out of the affair. He interviewed the young husband, who 
was reported to have said something like this: “Haw, haw, yaas, by Jove! 
Isn’t it awf’lly jolly rotten, what? They stole the bally jewels, haw, 
haw! ...” I cannot remember the exact words put into this young man’s 
mouth by the reporter, but they were not less foolish than those I have set out. 
If I had been editor of the newspaper in which the report appeared, I should 
have sacked that reporter without pity. He was a boob of the most booby 
character: a prominent member of what H. L. Mencken calls the booboisie. 
Only a complete idiot could have reported such an incredible speech! Only 
an ignorant or a malicious editor could have believed that such a speech could 
have been uttered by any intelligent human being! 

The reporter had either decided before the interview that all Englishmen of 
aristocratic birth speak like congenital idiots, and therefore could not listen 
accurately to what was being said to him, or he was too lazy or incompetent 
to do his work properly, and trusted to conventional caricature to cover up 
his own deficiencies. Whatever was the cause of this childish report, he ought 
to have been sacked from his job. He was unfit to be a reporter. He might 
have earned an honest living as a hawker or in some other occupation which 
makes no demand upon the intelligence. 

Mr. Ervine then proceeded to a detailed analysis of a book called 
“Full Up and Fed Up/’ by Whiting Williams, an American who 
lived as a workingman in England, Wales and Scotland during 1920, 
and sought to report the conversations of the native workingmen 
among whom he worked. He recorded the speech of an English 
laborer as follows: 

If Hi wuz you, Hi’d walk right in ter the fountain-’ead o’ these steel works 
’ere, and sye, “Hi wants ter see the manager!”—just like thot. With wot 
ye’ve done in Hamerica, ye’ll get on fine ’ere. 


And that of an English soldier thus: 

Hi never seen a ranker make a good hofficer yet—awnd Hi’ve ’ad ’em over 
me a lot—hadjutants and all. In the hexercises and heverywhere it’s alius 
“Hi’ve been there meself, boys, and it cawn’t be done. Hi’m too wise, boys.” 
You know ’ow it is. No, sir, never one. 


Said Mr. Ervine of these alleged specimens of Cockney English: 

Now, with all respect to Mr. Williams and his admirable book, I declare that 
never in his life did he hear any Englishman, illiterate or otherwise, talk 


176 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


in that fashion, unless, perhaps, it was a music-hall comedian trying (and 
failing) to be funny. I have lived in England for twenty-one years and I 
know the country, north and south, east and west, country and town, far 
better than Mr. Williams can ever hope to know it. I have lived among work¬ 
ing-people in London, in provincial towns and in villages, and I have never 
heard any Englishman speak in that style. I have been in the army, as a 
private soldier and as an officer, and I tell Mr. Williams that if he imagines 
he heard a soldier saying hexercises and heverywhere, then he simply has not 
got the faculty of hearing. The dropped h is common, but the sounding of it 
where it ought not to be sounded has almost ceased. I have never heard it 
sounded in a city, and only on one occasion have I heard it sounded in the 
country, where an old-fashioned fisherman, with whom I used to go sailing, 
would sometimes say liaccident when he meant accident. This man’s younger 
brother never misplaced the h at all in this way, though he often elided it 
where it ought to have been sounded. The h is more likely to be dropped than 
sounded because of the natural laziness of most people over language. As many 
errors of pronunciation are due to slovenliness and indolence as are due to 
illiteracy, and it is far easier to omit the h from a word than to sound it. 
A considerable effort is necessary in order to sound the h in words where 
there is no such letter, and this fact, apart altogether from the results of com¬ 
pulsory education, makes it unlikely that Mr. Williams heard anyone in 
England saying Hi for I and Hamerica for America.™ 

Mr. Ervine is of the opinion that popular novels perpetuate mis¬ 
conception of the common speech of England in America, and of 
that of the United States in England. “I imagine that most Ameri¬ 
cans,” he says, “form their impressions about English dialect from 
reading Dickens, and do not check these impressions with the facts 
of contemporary life. ... A popular novel will fix a dialect in 
the careless mind, and people will continue to believe that men and 
women speak in that particular fashion long after they have ceased 
to do so. Until I went to America, I believed that all negroes spoke 
like the characters in ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ Mr. John Drink- 
water clearly thought so, too, when he wrote ‘Abraham Lincoln.’ 
I expected to hear a negro saying something like ‘Yaas, massa, dat 
am so!’ when he meant, ‘Yes, sir, that is so!’ I daresay there are 
many negroes in America who do speak in that way; in fact, Mr. 
T. S. Stribling’s notable story, ‘Birthright,’ makes this plain. But 
all negroes do not do so, and perhaps the most correct English I 

M Cf. O. Jespersen: A Modern English Grammar; Heidelberg, 1922; vol. i. 
p. 378 ff. 


INTERNATIONAL EXCHANGES 


177 


heard during my short visit to the United States two years ago came 
from the mouth of a red-cap in Boston!” 

I incline to think that both the grand dialects of English would be 
the better for a somewhat freer interchange of words and idioms 
than is now observed, and fully endorse the doctrine laid 
down by Prof. Gordon Hall Gerould, of Princeton, who 
argues that it would be a sensible thing for Americans to adopt 
the English lift and tram in place of the more cumbersome elevator 
and trolley-car, and that the English, in their turn, would find the 
communication of ideas easier if they borrowed some of our Ameri¬ 
can neologisms. 27 “Logophobia,” he says, “has usually been a sign, 
in men of our race, of a certain thinness of blood. The man of 
imagination and the man with something to say have never been 
afraid of words, even words that have rung strangely on the ear. 
It has been the finicking person, not very sure of himself, who has 
trod delicately between alternatives, and used the accepted and time¬ 
worn word in preference to the newer coinage, out of his abhorrence 
born of fear. ... I do not wish to urge . . . the wiping out of 
those peculiarities of vocabulary by which one region of the English- 
speaking world is made to seem slightly exotic to the visitor from 
another. Without such differences of idiom, the common speech of 
the race would be the poorer, as the waters from many rivulets are 
needed to feed the river. Let him who says naturally a pail of 
water say so still, and him to whom a bucket is more familiar re¬ 
joice in his locution. Let my English friend call for his jug, while 
I demand my pitcher; for he will—if he be not afflicted with logo- 
phobia—enjoy what seems to him the fine archaic flavor of my word. 
What I would commend is a generous reciprocity in vocabulary, as 
between section and section, commonwealth and commonwealth, coun¬ 
try and country. If it should become convenient for us Americans 
to use a word now peculiar to Great Britain, I hope we should not 
be so silly as to stop it at the tongue’s end out of national pride or 
chauvinistic delicacy. It is evident that any ‘American’ language 
which might be evolved by the sedulous fostering on our part of na¬ 
tive idioms would still retain a good deal of the original English lan- 

37 In Reciprocity in Words, Literary Review of the New York Evening Post, 
Feb. 21, 1921. 


178 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


guage. Why, then, should we shut ourselves off from the good things 
in words that have been invented or popularized in Great Britain 
since the Pilgrims sailed ? And why, on the other hand, should the 
Englishman disdain the ingenious locutions that have come to light 
on this side the Atlantic?” 

A correspondent makes the suggestion that such exchanges, if they 
were more numerous, would greatly enrich each language’s stock of 
fine distinctions. A loan-word, he says, does not usually completely 
displace the corresponding native word, but simply puts a new dis¬ 
tinction beside it. Unquestionably, this often happens. Consider, 
for example, the case of shop. As it is now used in the American 
cities it affords a convenient means of distinguishing between a large 
store offering various lines of merchandise and a small establishment 
specializing in one line. The old-fashioned country store remains a 
store and so does the department-store. To call either a shop would 
seem absurd. Shop is applied exclusively to smaller establishments, 
and almost always in combination with some word designating the 
sort of stock they carry. Shop, indeed, has always been good Ameri¬ 
can, though its current application is borrowed from England. We 
have used shop-worn, shoplifter, shopping, pawn-shop, shopper, shop¬ 
girl and to shop for years. In the same way the word penny continues 
to flourish among us, despite the fact that there lias been no Ameri¬ 
can coin of that name for more than 125 years. We have nickel-in- 
the-slot machines, but when they take a cent we call them penny- 
in-the-slot machines. We have penny-arcades and penny-whistles. 
We do not play cent- ante, but penny- ante. We still “turn an honest 
penny” and say “a penny for your thoughts.” The pound and the 
shilling became extinct legally a century ago, 28 but the penny still 
binds us to the mother-tongue. But an American knows nothing of 
pence. To him two pennies are always pennies. 

Exchanges in spelling, some of them very important, are dis¬ 
cussed in Chapter VIII. 

“A correspondent assures me, however, that the York shilling, worth 12% 
cents, survived in New York City until 1865. Another correspondent tells me 
that, in the Middle West, the farmers who hawk vegetables from door to door 
in the smaller cities still sell them at a shilling a peck. In the South there 
are similar survivals. In some of the courts of Virginia, for example, the 
penalty for the failure of an officer to serve a subpoena is yet given as £20. 


TENDENCIES IN AMERICAN 


1 . 


General Characters 

The elements that enter into the special character of American 
have been rehearsed in the first chapter: a general impatience of 
rule and restraint, a democratic enmity to all authority, an extrava¬ 
gant and often grotesque humor, an extraordinary capacity for meta¬ 
phor 1 — in brief, all the natural marks of what Van Wyck 
Brooks calls “a popular life which bubbles with energy and spreads 
and grows and slips away ever more and more from the control 
of tested ideas, a popular life with the lid off.” 2 This is the spirit 
of America, and from it the American language is nourished. “The 
wish to see things afresh and for himself,” says Dr. Harry Morgan 
Ayres, 3 “is so characteristic of the American that neither in his 
speech nor his most considered writing does he need any urging 
to seek out ways of his own. He refuses to carry on his verbal 
traffic with the well-worn counters; he will always be new-writing 
them. He is on the lookout for words that say something; he has 
a sort of remorseless and scientific efficiency in the choice of epithets! 

. . . The American . . . has an Elizabethan love of exuberant 
language.” Brooks, perhaps, generalizes a bit too lavishly; Ayres 
calls attention to the fact that below the surface there is also a 
curious conservatism, even a sort of timorousness. In a land of 
manumitted peasants the primary trait of the peasant is bound to 
show itself now and then; as Wendell Phillips once said, “more 

•An interesting note on this characteristic is in College Words and Phrases, 
by Eugene H. Babbitt, Dialect Notes, vol. ii, pt. i, p. 11. 

8 America’s Coming of Age; p. 15. 

8 Art. The English Language in America, Cambridge History of American 
Literature, vol. iv, p. 570. 


179 


180 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


than any other people, we Americans are afraid of one another”— 
that is, afraid of isolation, of derision, of all the consequences of 
singularity. But in the field of language, as in that of politics, 
this suspicion of the new is often transformed into a suspicion 
of the merely unfamiliar, and so its natural tendency toward con¬ 
servatism is overcome. It is of the essence of democracy that it 
remain a government by amateurs, and under a government by 
amateurs it is precisely the expert who is most questioned—and 
it is the expert who commonly stresses the experience of the past. 
And in a democratic society it is not the iconoclast who seems most 
revolutionary, but the purist. The derisive designation of high¬ 
brow is thoroughly American in more ways than one. It is a word 
put together in an unmistakably American fashion, it reflects an 
habitual American attitude of mind, and its potency in debate is 
peculiarly national too. 

I suppose it is largely a fear of the weapon in it—and there are 
many others of like effect in the arsenal—which accounts for the 
far greater prevalence of idioms from below in the formal speech 
of America than in the formal speech of England. There is surely 
no English novelist of equal rank whose prose shows so much of 
colloquial looseness and ease as one finds in the prose of Howells: 
to find a match for it one must go to the prose of the neo-Celts, 
professedly modelled upon the speech of peasants, and almost proudly 
defiant of English grammar and syntax, and to the prose of the Eng¬ 
lish themselves before the Restoration. Nor is it imaginable that 
an Englishman of comparable education and position would ever 
employ such locutions as those I have hitherto quoted from the 
public addresses of Dr. Wilson—that is, innocently, seriously, as 
a matter of course. The Englishman, when he makes use of coin¬ 
ages of that sort, does so in conscious relaxation, and usually with 
a somewhat heavy sense of doggishness. They are proper to the 
paddock or even to the dinner table, but scarcely to serious scenes 
and occasions. But in the Unitel States their use is the rule rather 
than the exception; it is not the man who uses them, but the man 
who doesn’t use them, who is marked off. Their employment, if 
high example counts for anything, is a standard habit of the lan¬ 
guage, as their diligent avoidance is a standard habit of English. 





TENDENCIES IN AMERICAN 


181 


A glance through the Congressional Record is sufficient to show 
how small is the minority of purists among the chosen leaders of 
the nation. Within half an hour, turning at random the pages of 
the war issues, when all Washington was on its best behavior, I 
find scores of locutions that would paralyze the stenographers in 
the House of Com m ons, and they are in the speeches, not of wild 
mavericks from the West, but of some of the chief men of the two 
Houses. Surely no Senator occupied a more conspicuous position 
during the first year of the war than “Hon.” Lee S. Overman, of 
North Carolina, chairman of the Committee on Rules, and com¬ 
mander of the administration forces on the floor. Well, I find 
Senator Overman using to enthuse in a speech of the utmost serious¬ 
ness and importance, and not once, but over and over again . 4 I 
turn back a few pages and encounter it again—this time in the 
mouth of General Sherwood, of Ohio. A few more, and I find 
a fit match for it, to wit, to biograph . 5 The speaker here is Sena¬ 
tor L. Y. Sherman, of Illinois. In the same speech he uses to 
resolute . 6 A few more, and various other characteristic verbs are 
unearthed: to demagogue , 7 to dope out , 8 * to fall down Q (in the 
sense of to fail), to jack up, 10 to phone, 11 to peeve 12 to come across 13 
to hike, to butt in 14 to back pedal, to get solid with, to hospitalize 15 
to hooverize, to propaganda , 16 to trustify, to feature, to insurge, to 
haze, to reminisce, to camouflage, to play for a sucker, and so on, 
almost ad infinitum. And with them, a large number of highly 
American nouns, chiefly compounds, all pressing upward for recog¬ 
nition: tin-Lizzie, brain-storm, come-down, pin-head, trustification. 


4 March 26, 1918, pp. 4376-7. 

* Jan. 14, 1918, p. 903. 

B It is used again by Mr. Walsh, Congressional Record, May 16, 1921, p. 1468, 
col. 2. 

T Mr. Campbell, of Kansas, in the House, Jan. 19, 1918, p. 1134. 

8 Mr. Hamlin, of Missouri, in the House, Jan. 19, 1918, p. 1154. 

* Mr. Kirby, of Arkansas, in the Senate, Jan. 24, 1918, p. 1291; Mr. Lewis, 
of Illinois, in the Senate, June 6, 1918, p. 8024. 

10 Mr. Weeks, of Massachusetts, in the Senate, Jan. 17, 1918, p. 988. 

11 Mr. Smith, of South Carolina, in the Senate, Jan. 17, 1918, p. 991. 

13 Mr. Borland, of Missouri, in the House, Jan. 29, 1918, p. 1501. 

18 May 4, 1917, p. 1853. 

14 Mr. Snyder, of New York, Dec. 11, 1917. 

u Senator Walsh, of Massachusetts, May 27, 1921, p. 1835. 

16 Used in the form of propagandaed by Mr. Bland, of Indiana, in the House, 
May 16, 1921, p. 1481, col. 1. 


182 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


pork-barrel, buck-private, dough-boy, cow-country. And adjectives: 
jitney, bush (for rural), balled-up , 17 dolled-up, phoney, pussy-footed, 
tax-paid . 18 And picturesque phrases: dollars to doughnuts, on the 
job, that gets me, one best bet. And back-formations: ad, movie, 
photo. And various substitutions and Americanized inflections: 
over for more than, gotten for got in the present perfect, 19 rile for 
roil, bust for burst. This last, in truth, has come into a dignity that 
even grammarians will soon hesitate to question. Who, in Amer¬ 
ica, would dare to speak of bursting a broncho, or of a trustburster? 20 

Turn to any issue of the Congressional Record and you will find 
examples of American quite as startling as those I have exhumed— 
and some a good deal more startling. I open the file for 1919 at 
random, and at once discover “they had put it on the market in a 
condition in which it could be drank as a beverage.” 21 A moment 
later I find, from the same lips, “The evidence disclosed that Jacobs 
had drank 28 bottles of lemon extract.” A few pages further on, 
and I come to “It will not take but a few minutes to dispose of 
it.” 22 I take up another volume and find the following curious 
letter written by a Senator and inserted in the Record at his re¬ 
quest : 


Hon. Edgar E. Clark, 

Chairman Interstate Commerce Commission, 

Washington, D. C. 

My dear Mr. Chairman: It has been brought to my attention by many 
people in Georgia and those whom I see here that the present high passenger 
and freight rates are doing more to decrease the amount of income received by 
the railroads than if a lower rate was in effect, which would cause more freight 

17 Balled-up and its verb, to ball up, were once improper, no doubt on ac¬ 
count of the slang significance of ball, but of late they have made steady prog¬ 
ress toward polite acceptance. 

11 After the passage of the first War Revenue Act cigar-boxes began to bear 
this inscription: “The contents of this box have been taxed paid as cigars of 
Class B as indicated by the Internal Revenue stamp affixed.” Even tax-paid, 
which was later substituted, is obviously better than this clumsy double inflec¬ 
tion. 

“Mr. Bankhead, of Alabama, in the Senate, May 14, 1918, p. 6995. 

30 Bust seems to be driving out burst completely when used figuratively. Even 
in a literal sense it creeps into more or less respectable usage. Thus I find 
“a busted tire” in a speech by Gen. Sherwood, of Ohio, in the House, Jan. 24, 
1918. The familiar American derivative, buster, as in Buster Brown, is unknown 
to the English. 

31 Mr. Tincher, of Kansas, in the House, July 19, 1919, p. 3009. 

“Mr. Blanton, of Texas, in the House, Aug. 12, 1919, p. 4057. 


TENDENCIES IN AMERICAN 


183 


to move and more people to travel. In other words, the railroads are not carry¬ 
ing an average maximum of freight and passengers since the increase in rates. 
Of course, the commission doubtless has figures on this question which throw 
more light than I can by general observations. 

It is needless for me to point out to you and the commission that the railroad 
situation is a problem which has not been solved to any great degree by the 
transportation act of 1920. The thing which I am greatly interested in is the 
matter of freight and passenger rates to be placed within reach of the average 
person, and at the same time give the railroads a reasonable income for their 
investment. Both the public and the roads deserve an honest living, but I fear 
that both are now suffering. Because of high freight rates there are products 
in my State which are now being shipped in such small quantities in comparison 
with production and demand. 

I hope that an adjustment can soon be made which will bring down the rates, 
and I would thank you to let me have any information on the matter at your 
convenience which may have been gathered or published by the commission. 

With high esteem, I am, 

Very sincerely yours, 

Wm. J. Harris ® 

I leave the analysis of the American political style here displayed 
to grammarians. They will find plenty of further clinical material 
in the speeches of Mr. Harding—the one-he combination in the 
first sentence of his inaugural address, illy in the fourth sentence 
of his first message to Congress, and many other choice specimens 
in his subsequent state papers. Nor are politicians the only Ameri¬ 
cans who practise the flouting of the purists. In a serious book 
on literature by a former editor of the Atlantic Monthly , 24 edited 
by a committee of Yale professors and published by the university 
press, I find the one-he combination in full flower, and in a book 
of criticism by Francis Hackett, then of the New Republic, I find 
pinhead used quite innocently, and to do him proud topping it. 25 
Hackett is relatively conservative. The late Horace Traubel, 
disciple of Whitman, went much further. All his life he battled 
valiantly for the use of dont (without the apostrophe) with singular 
subjects! 

M Of Georgia. Congressional Record, Feb. 21, 1921, p. 3755. 

“The American Spirit in Literature, by Bliss Perry; New Haven, 1918, p. 117. 
“If one habitually prints the w’ords, . . . one may do it because he is a Carlyle 
or an Emerson, but the chances are that he is neither.” 

“The Invisible Censor; New York, 1921, pp. 6 and 60 respectively. All by 
her lonesome is in Horizons; New York, 1918, by the same author, p. 53. 



184 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


2 . 


Lost Distinctions 

This general iconoclasm reveals itself especially in a disdain for 
most of the niceties of modem English. The American, like the 
Elizabethan Englishman, is usually quite unconscious of them and 
even when they have been instilled into him by the hard labor of 
pedagogues he commonly pays little heed to them in his ordinary 
discourse. The distinction between each other and one another 
offers a salient case in point; all the old effort to confine the first 
to two persons or objects and the latter to more than two seems to be 
breaking down. 26 So with the very important English distinction 
between trill and shall. This last, it may be said at once, is far 
more a confection of the grammarians than a product of the nat¬ 
ural forces shaping the language. It has, indeed, little etymological 
basis, and is but imperfectly justified logically. One finds it dis¬ 
regarded in the Authorized Version of the Bible, in all the plays of 
Shakespeare, in the essays of the reign of Anne, and in some of the 
best examples of modem English literature. The theory behind 
it is so inordinately abstruse that the Eowlers, in “The King’s 
English,” 27 require 20 pages to explain it, and even then they come 
to the resigned conclusion that the task is hopeless. “The idiomatic 
use [of the two auxiliaries],” they say, “is so complicated that 
those who are not to the manner born can hardly acquire it.” 28 
Well, even those who are to the manner born seem to find it diffi¬ 
cult, for at once the learned authors cite blunders in the writings 
of Richardson, Stevenson, Gladstone, Jowett, Oscar Wilde, and 
even Henry Sweet, author of the best existing grammar of the Eng¬ 
lish language. In American the distinction is almost lost. Ho 
ordinary American, save after the most laborious reflection, would 

** “Among the first acquaintances I made was one with Mr. Blackmon. We 
had offices close to one another .” Mr. Venable, of Mississippi, in the House, 
Congressional Record, Feb. 20, 1921, p. 3730. 

27 Pp. 133-154. 

” L. Pearsall Smith, in The English Language, p. 29, says that “the differen¬ 
tiation is ... so complicated that it can hardly be mastered by those born in 
parts of the British Islands in which it has not yet been established,” e. g., 
all of Ireland and most of Scotland. 


TENDENCIES IN AMERICAN 


185 


detect anything wrong in this sentence from the London Times, de¬ 
nounced as corrupt by the Fowlers: “We must reconcile what 
we would like to do with what we can do.” Nor in this by W. B. 
Yeats: “The character who delights us may commit murder like 
Macbeth . . . and yet we will rejoice in every happiness that comes 
to him.” Half a century ago, impatient of the effort to fasten the 
English distinction upon Am erican, George P. Marsh attacked it 
as of “no logical value or significance whatever,” and predicted 
that “at no very distant day this verbal quibble will disappear, and 
one of the auxiliaries will be employed, with all persons of the 
nominative, exclusively as the sign of the future, and the other 
only as an expression of purpose or authority.” 29 This prophecy 
Jhas been substantially verified. Will is sound American “with all 
persons of the nominative,” and shall is almost invariably an “ex¬ 
pression of purpose or authority.” 30 

And so, though perhaps not to the same extent, with who and 
whom. Now and then there arises a sort of panicky feeling that 
whom is being neglected, and so it is trotted out, 31 but in the main 
the American language tends to dispense with it, at least in its less 
graceful situations. Noah Webster, always the pragmatic reformer, 
denounced it so long ago as 1783. Common sense, he argued, was 
on the side of “who did he marry ?” Today such a form as “whom 
are you talking to?” would seem somewhat affected in ordinary 

“Quoted by White, in Words and Their Uses, pp. 264-5. White, however, 
dissented vigorously and devoted 10 pages to explaining the difference between 
the two auxiliaries. Most of the other authorities of the time were also against 
Marsh—for example, Richard Meade Bache (see his Vulgarisms and Other 
Errors of Speech, p. 92 et seq.). Sir Edmund Head, governor-general of Canada 
from 1854 to 1861, wrote a whole book upon the subject: Shall and Will, or 
Two Chapters on Future Auxiliary Verbs; London, 1856. In her Tendencies in 
Modern American Poetry; New York, 1917, Amy Lowell takes Carl Sandburg 
and Edgar Lee Masters to task for constantly using will for shall, and says that 
they share the habit “with many other modern American writers.” See also Text, 
Type and Style, by George B. Ives; Boston, 1921, p. 289 ff. 

“The probable influence of Irish immigration upon the American usage is not 
to be overlooked. Joyce says flatly (English As We Speak It in Ireland, p. 77) 
that, “like many another Irish idiom this is also found in American society 
chiefly through the influence of the Irish.” At all events, the Irish example 
must have reinforced it. In Ireland “Will I light the fire, ma’am?” is collo¬ 
quially sound. 

“Often with such amusing results as “whom is your father?” and “whom 
spoke to me?” For these, alas, there is eminent authority. Cf. Matthew xvi, 13: 
“When Jesus came into the coasts of Cesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, 
saying, Whom do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?” See also Otto Jespersen; 
Chapters on English; London, 1918, p. 52. 


186 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


discourse in America; “who are you talking to?” is heard a thou¬ 
sand times oftener, and is doubly American, for it substitutes who 
for whom and puts a preposition at the end of a sentence: two crimes 
that most English purists wrnuld seek to avoid. It is among the 
pronouns that the only remaining case inflections in English are 
to be found, if we forget the possessive, and even here these sur¬ 
vivors of an earlier day begin to grow insecure. Lounsbury’s defense 
of “it is me,” 32 as we shall see in the next chapter, has support in 
the history and natural movement of the language, and that move¬ 
ment is also against the preservation of the distinction between who 
and whom. The common speech plays hob with both of the ortho¬ 
dox inflections, despite the protests of grammarians, and in the 
long run, no doubt, they will be forced to yield to its pressure, as 
they have always yielded in the past. Between the dative and ac¬ 
cusative on one side and the nominative on the other there has been 
war in the English language for centuries, and it has always tended 
to become a war of extermination. Our now universal use of you 
for ye in the nominative shows the dative and accusative swallow¬ 
ing the nominative. In such wars a posse comitatus marches 
ahead of the disciplined army. American stands to English in 
the relation of that posse to that army. 

A shadowy line often separates what is currently coming into 
sound usage from what is still regarded as barbarous. Ho self- 
respecting American, I assume, would defend ain’t as a substitute 
for isn’t, say in “he ain’t the man,” and yet ain’t is already tolerably 
respectable in the first person, where English countenances the even 
more clumsy aren’t. Aren’t has never got a foothold in the Ameri¬ 
can first person; when it is used at all, which is very rarely, it is 
always as a conscious Briticism. Facing the alternative of employ¬ 
ing the unwieldy “am I not in this ?” the American turns boldly to 
“ain’t I in this?’" It still grates a bit, perhaps, but aren’t grates 
even more . 33 Here, as always, the popular speech is pulling the 
exacter speech along, and no one familiar with its successes in the 

** “It is 7” is quite as unsound historically. The correct form would be “it 
am I” or “I am it.” Compare the German “ich bin es,” not. “es ist ich.” 

" For an interesting discussion of aren’t see a letter by H. E. Boot in English, 
June, 1920, p. 376, and one by Daniel Jones in the same periodical, Aue.-Sept, 
1920, p. 399. r 



TENDENCIES IN AMERICAN 


187 


past can have much doubt that it will succeed again, soon or late. 
In the same way it is breaking down the inflectional distinction 
between adverb and adjective, so that in bad begins to take 
on the dignity of a national idiom, and sure, to go big and 
run slow 34 become almost respectable. When, on the entrance of the 
United States into the late war, the Tank Corps chose “Treat ’em 
rough” as its motto, no one thought to raise a grammatical objec¬ 
tion, and the clipped adverb was printed upon hundreds of thou¬ 
sands of posters and displayed in every town in the country, always 
with the imprimatur of the national government. So again, Amer¬ 
ican, in its spoken form, tends to obliterate the distinction between 
nearly related adjectives, e. g., healthful and healthy, tasteful and 
tasty. And to challenge the somewhat absurd text-book prohibition 
of terminal prepositions, so that “where are we at?” loses its old 
raciness. And to substitute as though for as if. And to dally with 
a supererogatory but, as in “I have no doubt but that.” 35 

But these tendencies, or at least the more extravagant of them, 
belong to the next chapter. How much influence they exert, even 
indirectly, is shown by the American disdain of the English pre¬ 
cision in the use of the indefinite pronoun, already noticed. I turn 
to the Saturday Evening Post, and in two minutes find: “one feels 
like an atom when lie begins to review his own life and deeds.” 36 
The error is very rare in written English; the Fowlers, seeking exam¬ 
ples of it, could get them only from the writings of a third-rate woman 
novelist, Scotch to boot. But it is so common in American that when 
Hr. Harding used it in the first sentence of his inaugural address 
even his Democratic editorial enemies failed to notice it, and when 
I denounced it in the Nation it was vigorously defended. The 
appearance of a redundant s in such words as towards, downwards, 

** A common direction to motormen and locomotive engineers. The English 
form is “slow down.” I note, however, that “drive slowly” is in the taxicab shed 
at the Pennsylvania Station, in New York. 

35 Here I quote from a speech made by Senator Sherman, of Illinois, in the 
Senate on June 20, 1918. Vide Congressional Record for that day, p. 8743. 
Two days later, “There is no question but that” appeared in a letter by John 
Lee Coulter, A.M., Ph.D., dean of West Virginia University. It was read into 
the Record of June 22 by Mr. Ashwell, one of the Louisiana representatives. 
Even the pedantic Senator Henry Cabot Lodge uses but that. Vide the Record 
for May 14, 1918, p. 6996. See also Senator Borah’s use of it, Record, May 14, 
1921, p". 1434. 

“June 15, 1918, p. 62. 



THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


18$ 

afterwards and heavenwards is equally familiar. In England this s 
usually marks a distinction in meaning, as it does on both 
sides of the ocean between beside and besides. “In modern 
standard English/’ says Smith, 37 “though not in the Eng¬ 
lish of the United States, a distinctoin which we feel, but 
many of us could not define, is made between forward and forwards; 
forwards being used in definite contrast to any other direction, as 
‘if you move at all, you can only move forwards,’ while forward 
is used where no such contrast is implied, as in the common phrase 
‘to bring a matter forward.’ ” 38 This specific distinction, despite 
Smith, probably retains some force in the United States too, but in 
general our usage allows the s in cases where English usage would 
certainly be against it. Gould, in the 50’s, noted its appearance 
at the end of such words as somewhere and anyway, and denounced 
it as vulgar and illogical. Thornton traces anyways back to 1842 
and shows that it is an archaism, and to be found in the Book of 
Common Prayer ( circa 1560); perhaps it has been preserved by 
analogy with sideways. Henry James, in “The Question of Our 
Speech,” attacked “such forms of impunity as somewheres else and 
nowheres else, a good ways on and a good ways off” as “vulgarisms 
with which a great deal of general credit for what we good-naturedly 
call ‘refinement’ appears so able to coexist.” 39 Towards and after¬ 
wards, though frowned upon in England, are now quite sound in 
America. I find the former in the title of an article in Dialect 
Notes, which plainly gives it scholastic authority. 40 More (and 
with no little humor), I find it in the deed of a fund given to the 
American Academy of Arts and Letters to enable the gifted philologs 
of that sanhedrin “to consider its duty towards the conservation 
of the English language in its beauty and purity.” 41 Both towards 

87 The English Language, p. 79. 

“This phrase, of course, is a Briticism, and seldom used in America. The 
American form is “to take a matter up.” 

38 The Question of Our Speech, p. 30. He might have been even more eloquent 
had he tackled no place and some place, latter-day substitutes for nowheres and 
somewheres. Or the common American habit of treating such plurals as woods, 
falls, links, works, yards, grounds, etc., as singulars. See Dialect Notes, vol. iv, 
pt. i, p. 48 (1913) . 

40 A Contribution Towards, etc., by Prof. H. Tallichet, vol. i, pt. iv. But the t 
is omitted in the index to Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 459. 

**Yale Review, April, 1918, p. 545. 


TENDENCIES IN AMERICAN 


189 


and afterwards, finally, are included in the New York Evening 
Post’s list of “words no longer disapproved when in their proper 
places/’ along with over for more than, and during for in the 
course of. 


3. 

Processes of Word-Formation 

Some of the tendencies visible in American— e. g., toward the 
facile manufacture of new compounds, toward the transfer of words 
from one part of speech to another, and toward the free use 
of suffixes and prefixes and the easy isolation of roots and pseudo- 
roots—go back to the period of the first growth of a distinct Ameri¬ 
can dialect and are heritages from the English of the time. They 
are the products of a movement which, reaching its height in the 
English of Elizabeth, was dammed up at home, so to speak, by 
the rise of linguistic self-consciousness toward the end of the reign 
of Anne, but continued almost unobstructed in the colonies. 

Eor example, there is what philologists call the habit of clipping 
—a sort of instinctive search, etymologically unsound, for short 
roots in long words. This habit, in Restoration days, pre¬ 
cipitated a quasi-English word, mobile, from the Latin mobile 
vulgus, and in the days of William and Mary it went a step 
further by precipitating mob from mobile. Mob is now sound 
English, but in the eighteenth century it was violently attacked by 
the new sect of purists, 42 and though it survived their onslaught they 
undoubtedly greatly impeded the formation and adoption of other 
words of the same category. There are, however, many more such 
words in standard English, e. g., patter from paternoster, van from 
caravan, wig from periwig, cab from cabriolet, brandy from brandy- 
wine (= brandewyn), pun from pundigrion, grog from grogram, 
curio from curiosity, canter from Canterbury, brig from brigantine, 
bus from omnibus, bant from Banting and fad from fadaised 3 In 

° Vide Lounsbury: The Standard of Usage in English, pp. 65-7. 

“ An interesting discussion of such words is in Otto Jespersen’s Growth 
and Structure of the English Language, 3rd ed.; Leipzig, 1919, pp. 170-2. See 
also Clipped Words, by Elisabeth Wittmann, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. ii (1914), 
pp. 115 ff., and Stunts in Language, by Louise Pound, English Journal, vol. ix, 
no. 2 (Feb., 1920), pp. 88 ff. 


190 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


the colonies there was no such opposition to them as came from the 
purists of the English universities; save for a few feeble protests 
from Witherspoon and Boucher they went unchallenged. As a re¬ 
sult they multiplied enormously. Battler for rattlesnake, pike for 
turnpike, draw for drawbridge, coon for raccoon, possum for opos¬ 
sum, cuss for customer, squash for askutasquash —these American 
clipped forms are already antique; Sabbaday for Sabbath-day 
has actually reached the dignity of an archaism, as has the 
far later chromo for chromolithograph. To this day they are 
formed in great numbers; scarcely a new substantive of more than 
two syllables comes in without bringing one in its wake. We have 
thus witnessed, within the past few years, the genesis of scores now 
in wide use and fast taking on respectability: phone for telephone, 
gas for gasoline, co-ed for co-educational, pop for populist, frat for 
fraternity, gym for gymnasium-, movie for moving picture, plane for 
air-plane, prep-school for preparatory-school, auto for automobile, 
aero for aeroplane and aeronautical. Some linger on the edge of 
vulgarity: pep for pepper, flu for influenza, plute for plutocrat, 
vamp for vampire, pen for penitentiary, con for confidence (as in 
con-man, con-game and to con), convict and consumption, defi for 
defiance, beaut for beauty, rep for reputation, stenog for stenog¬ 
rapher, ambish for ambition, vag for vagrant, champ for champion, 
pard for partner, coke for cocaine, simp for simpleton, diff for 
difference, grass for asparagus, mum for chrysanthemum, mutt for 
muttonhead , 44 wiz for wizard, rube for Reuben, hon for honey, 
barkeep for barkeeper, divvy for dividend or division, jit for 
jitney. Others are already in good usage: smoker for smoking- 
car, diner for dining-car, sleeper for sleeping-car, oleo for oleomar¬ 
garine, hypo for hyposulphite of soda, Yarik for Yankee, confab for 
confabulation, memo for memorandum, pop-concert for popular- 
concert, gator for alligator, foots for footlights, ham for liamfalter 
(actor), sub for substitute, knicker for knickerbocker. Many back- 
formations originate in college slang, e. g., prof for professor, prom 
for promenade, soph for sophomore, grad for graduate (noun), lab 

u This etymology.for mutt is supported by Bud Fisher, creator of Mutt and 
Jeff. See Editor and Publisher, April 17, 1919, p. 21. 


TENDENCIES IN AMERICAN 


191 


for laboratory, dorm for dormitory, plebe for plebeian . 45 Ad for 
advertisement is struggling hard for general recognition; some of 
its compounds, e. g., ad-writer, want-ad, display-ad, ad-card, ad-rate, 
ad-visor, column-ad and ad-man, are already accepted in technical ter¬ 
minology. Boob for booby promises to become sound American in a 
few years; its synonyms are no more respectable than it is. At its 
heels are bo for liobo, and hoak for hoakum, two altogether fit success- 
sors to bum for bummer. Try for trial, as in “He made a try at it,” 
is also making progress but perhaps try-out, a characteristically Amer¬ 
ican combination of verb and preposition, will eventually displace it. 
This production of new words by clipping, hack-formation and folk- 
etymology is quite as active among the verbs as among the nouns. I 
have already described the appearance of such forms as to locate 
in the earliest days of differentiation and the popularity of such 
forms as to enthuse and to phone today. Many more verbs of the 
same sort have attained to respectability, e. g., to jell, to auto, to 
commute, to typewrite, to tiptoe (for to walk tiptoe). Others are 
still on probation, e. g., to reminisce, to insurge, to vamp, to peeve, 
to jubilate, to taxi, to orate, to bach ( i. e., to live in bachelor quar¬ 
ters), to emote. Yet others are still unmistakably vulgar or merely 
waggish, e.g., to plumb (from plumber ), to barb (from barber ), to 
chauf (from chauffeur), to ready (from to make ready), to elocute, 
to burgle, to ush, to sculp, to butch, to con (from confidence-man), 
to buttle, to barkeep, to dressmake, to housekeep, to boheme, to 
photo, to divvy. Such forms seem to make an irresistible appeal to 
the American; he is constantly experimenting with new ones. “There 
is a much greater percentage of humorous shortenings among verbs,” 
says Miss Wittmann, “than among other parts of speech. Especially 
is this true of verbs shortened from nouns and adjectives by sub¬ 
tracting what looks like a derivative* suffix, e. g., -er, -or, -ing, -ent 
from nouns, or -y from adjectives. Many clipped verbs have noun 
parallels, while some are simply clipped nouns used as verbs.” 46 
Miss Wittmann calls attention to the curious fact that very few ad- 

46 Some of these college forms are very picturesque, e. g., weir for weird 
(Dartmouth), dent for dental student (University of Minnesota), and psych 
for psychology (Vassar). See College Words and Phrases, by E. H. Babbitt, 
Dialect Notes, vol. ii, pt. i, pp. 3 ff. 

46 Clipped W T ords, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. ii, p. 137. 


192 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


jectives are clipped in American; there are actually more of them 
in British English. Secesh (from secessionist, really a noun, but 
often used as an adjective) is one of the few familiar examples. 
Adjectives are made copiously in American, but most of them are 
made by other processes. 

Another popular sort of neologism is the blend- or portmanteau- 
word. Many such words are in standard English, e. g., Lewis Car¬ 
roll’s chortle (from chuckle and snort), dumbfound (from dumb 
and confound ), luncheon (lunch-fnuncheon), blurt (blare-\-spurt). 
American contributed gerrymander (Gerrysalamander) so long 
ago as 1812, and in more recent years has produced many blends 
that have gone over into standard English, e. g., cablegram (cable- f- 
telegram), electrocute (electricity + execute), electrolier (electric¬ 
ity -\-chandelier), doggery (dog-fgroggery), riffle (in a stream; 
probably from ripple and ruffle). Perhaps travelogue (travel -f- 
monologue), Luther Burbank’s pomato (potato-\-tomato), slan¬ 
guage (slang-\-language), and thon (tkat+one) 47 will one 
day follow. Boost (boom-\-hoist) is a typical American blend. 
I have a notion that blurb is a blend also. So, perhaps, is 
flunk; Dr. Louise Pound says that it may be from fail and 
funk. 48 Aframerican, which is now very commonly used in the 
Negro press, is not American, but was devised by Sir Harry John¬ 
ston. 49 Allied with the portmanteau-words are many blends of a 
somewhat different sort, in which long compounds are displaced by 
forms devised by analogy with existing words. Printery (for print¬ 
ing-office) appeared very early, and in late years it has been rein¬ 
forced by many analogues, e. g., beanery, bootery, boozery, toggery. 
Condensery is used in the West to indicate a place where milk is 
condensed. I have encountered breadery in Baltimore; Dr. Pound 

4T Thon was first proposed by C. C. Converse, of Erie, Pa., in 1858, as a 
substitute for the clumsy he-and (or) -she and him-and (or) -her. 

"Blends; Heidelberg, 1914, p. 25. (Anglistische Forschungen, heft 42.) See 
also her “Stunts” in Language, English Journal , Feb., 1920, pp. 91 ff. 

"“He uses it,” writes James W. Johnson, the Negro poet, “in his The Negro 
in the New World, 1910. He may have used it in some earlier publication 
also.” I do not know the origin of the analogous Amerind (= American 
Indian). It was used by H. G. Wells, in his Outline of History. See a letter 
by Alice Corbin Henderson in the Freeman, April 26, 1922, p. 161. 


TENDENCIES IN AMERICAN 


193 


reports hashery and drillery , 60 Somewhat similar are the words 
suggested by cafeteria , once a California localism. 51 Among other 
strange forms I have encountered haberteria (for haberdashery ) and 
groceriteria (for grocery-store). The wide use of the suffix -ette 
in such terms as farmerette, conductor ette, kitchenette, cellarette, 
featurette, leatherette, flannelette, crispette, usherette and husker- 
ette, is due to the same effort to make one word do the work of two. 
In Baltimore, in 1918, the street railways company appealed to the 
public to drop conductorette and go back to woman conductor, but the 
new word survived. 52 I suspect that the popularity of near- as a pre¬ 
fix has much the same psychological basis. Near-beer is surely sim¬ 
pler than imitation beer or non-alcoholic beer, and near-silk is better 
than the long phrase that would have to be used to describe it accu¬ 
rately. So with the familiar and numerous terms in -ee, -ite, -ster, 
-ist, -er, -dom, -itis, -ism, -ize, etc., e. g., draftee, Kreislerite, dopester, 
chalkologist, soap-boxer, picturedom, golfitis, Palmerism, to hooverize, 
and so on. They all represent efforts to condense the meaning of 
whole phrases into simple and instantly-understandable words. “The 
great majority of shortened forms,” says Miss Wittmann, “are clearly 
made for convenience; their speakers employ them to save time and 
trouble.” 63 Here, incidentally, the influence of newspaper head-lines 
is not to be overlooked. The American head-line writer faces pe¬ 
culiar difficulties; he must get clearly explanatory phrases into very 
small space, and almost always he is handicapped by arbitrary regu¬ 
lations as to typographical arrangement—regulations which do not 
oppress his English colleague. As a result he is an ardent propa¬ 
gandist for short words, e. g., probe (for investigation), grab, steal, 
haul, wed (for wedded), hello-girl (for telephone-girl), soul-mate, 
love-nest, love-pirate, and so on. He constantly uses up in the some- 

" Vogue Affixes in Present-Day Word-Coinage, Dialect Notes, vol. v, pt. i 
(1918), p. 10. 

S1 A correspondent tells me, however, that the first cafeteria was in Chicago. 
He says: “A Chicago man was planning to open a new lunchroom in that city 
with the new feature of the guests serving themselves. He wanted a new and 
appropriate name for it, and applied to my cousin, who had lived in Buenos 
Aires. This cousin suggested cafeteria, which was adopted. It should be 
accented on the penultimate, but the patrons immediately moved the accent one 
place forward. This was about the year 1900.” 

“Baltimore Trolley News, June 16, 1918. 

68 Clipped Words, op. oit., p. 116. 



194 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


thing s up sense, e. g., “Dry Question TJp in Legislature.” The pop¬ 
ularity of Hun, during the War, was no doubt largely due to the 
exigencies of his calling. He never uses a long word when a short 
one will answer, and he never uses articles when they can be avoided. 
Possibly the omission of the article in such American phrases as 
up street, all gear and all Sunday (the Englishman would probably 
say all day on Sunday) is largely due to his influence. Certainly, 
he is an eager merchant of all such neologisms as sub-deb, stamd-pat, 
try-out, co-ed, gym, auto, defi and phoned 

The same motives show themselves in the great multiplication of 
common abbreviations in America. “Americans, as a rule,” says 
Farmer, “employ abbreviations to an extent unknown in Europe. 
. . . This trait of the American character is discernible in every 
department of the national life and thought.” 0. K., C. 0. D., 
N. G., G. 0. P. (signifying grand old party or get out and push) 
and P. D. Q. are almost national hall-marks; the immigrant 
learns them immediately after damn and go to hell. Thornton 
traces N. G. to 1840; C. 0. D. and P. D. Q. are probably 
almost as old. As for 0. K., it was in use so early 
as 1790. “In colonial days,” says a floating newspaper para¬ 
graph, “the best rum and tobacco were imported from Aux Cayes, 
in Santo Domingo. Hence the best of anything came to be known 
locally as Aux Cayes, or 0. K. The term did not, however, come to 
be generally used until the Presidential campaign of 1828, when 
the supposed illiteracy of Andrew Jackson, sometimes known as the 
founder of Democracy, was the stock in trade of his Whig opponents. 
Seba Smith, the humorist, writing under the name of ‘Major Jack 
Downing,’ started the story that Jackson endorsed his papers 0. K., 
under the impression that they formed the initials of Oil Korrect. 
Possibly the General did use this endorsement, and it may have been 
used by other people also. But James Parton has discovered in the 
records of the Nashville court of which Jackson was a judge, before 
he became President, numerous documents endorsed 0. R., meaning 

54 An amusing article on the influence of headlines upon American speech- 
habits. by Philip Littell, will be found in the New Republic , July 27, 1921. See 
also Plots and Personalities, by Edwin E. Slosson and June E* Downey; New 
York, 1922, p. 189; and My Discovery of England, by Stephen Leacock; New 
York, 1922, p. 121. 


TENDENCIES IN AMERICAN 


195 


Order Recorded. He urges, therefore, that it was a record of that 
court with some belated business which Major Downing saw on the 
desk of the Presidential candidate. However this may be, the 
Democrats, in lieu of denying the charge, adopted the letters 0. K. 
as a sort of party cry and fastened them upon their banners.” There 
is, however, a rival etymology for 0. K., whereby it is derived from 
an Indian word, okeh, signifying “so be it.” Dr. Woodrow Wilson 
supported this derivation, and used okeh in approving papers sub¬ 
mitted to him as President; it also appears as the name of a popular 
series of phonograph records. Bartlett says that the figurative use of 
A No. 1 , as in an A No. 1 man , also originated in America, but this 
may not be true. There can he little doubt, however, about T. B. 
(for tuberculosis ), G. B. (for grand bounce), 23, on the Q. T., f. o. b., 
D. & D. ( drunk and disorderly) and the army verb, to a. w. o. 1. 
(to be absent without leave). The language breeds such short forms 
of speech prodigiously; every trade and profession has a host of 
them; they are innumerable in the slang of sport. 55 Often they 
represent the end-products of terms long in decay, e. g., elevated rail¬ 
way: elevated: el: L. Curiously enough, Americans, in speaking, 
never abbreviate company to co (pro. koh), as the English do. 

What one sees under all this is a double habit that sufficiently ex¬ 
plains the gap which begins to yawn between English and American, 
particularly on the spoken plane. On the one hand it is a habit of 
verbal economy—a jealous disinclination to waste two words on 
what can be put into one, a natural taste for the brilliant and suc¬ 
cinct, a contempt for all grammatical and lexicographical dainti¬ 
nesses, born partly, perhaps, of ignorance, but also in part of a sound 
sense of their imbecility. And on the other hand there is a high 
relish and talent for metaphor—in Brander Matthews’ phrase, “a fig¬ 
urative vigor that the Elizabethans would have realized and under¬ 
stood.” Just as the American rebels instinctively against such 
parliamentary circumlocutions as “I am not prepared to say” and 
“so much by way of being,” 56 just as he would fret under the forms 

“ Cf. Semi-Secret Abbreviations, by Percy W. Long, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. 
iii, 1915. 

66 The classical example is in a parliamentary announcement by Sir Robert Peel: 
“When that question is made to me in a proper time, in a proper place, under 
proper qualifications, and with proper motives, I will hesitate long before I will 
refuse to take it into consideration.” 



196 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


of English journalism, with its reporting empty of drama, its third- 
person smothering of speeches and its complex and unintelligible 
jargon, just so, in his daily speech and writing he chooses terseness 
and vividness whenever there is any choice, and seeks to make one 
when it doesn’t exist. There is more than mere humorous contrast 
between the famous placard in the wash-room of the British 
Museum: “These Basins Are For Casual Ablutions Only,” and the 
familiar sign at American railroad-crossings: “Stop! Look! Listen!” 
Between the two lies an abyss separating two cultures, two habits 
of mind, two diverging tongues. It is almost unimaginable that 
Englishmen, journeying up and down in elevators, would ever have 
stricken the teens out of their speech, turning sixteenth into simple 
six and twenty-fourth into four; the clipping is almost as far from 
their way of doing things as the climbing so high in the air. Nor 
have they the brilliant facility of Americans for making new words 
of grotesque but penetrating tropes, as in corn-fed, tight-wad, dumb¬ 
bell (for simpleton ), bone-head, bleachers and juice (for electricity ) ; 
when they attempt such things the result is often lugubrious; two 
hundred years of school-mastering has dried up their inspiration. 
Nor have they the fine American hand for devising new verbs; 
to maffick, to limehouse, to strafe and to wangle are their best speci¬ 
mens in twenty years, and all have an almost pathetic flatness. 
Their business with the language, indeed, is not in this department. 
They are not charged with its raids and scoutings, but with the 
organization of its conquests and the guarding of its accumulated 
stores. 

For the student interested in the biology of language, as opposed 
to its paleontology, there is endless material in the racy neologisms 
of American, and particularly in its new compounds and novel verbs. 
Nothing could exceed the brilliancy of such inventions as joy-ride, 
high-brow, road-louse, sob-sister, frame-up, loan-shark, nature-faker, 
stand-patter, lounge-lizard, hash-foundry, tin-horn, has-been, end- 
seat-hog, shoot-the-chutes and grape-juice diplomacy. They are bold; 
they are vivid; they have humor; they meet genuine needs. Joy¬ 
ride has already gone over into English, and no wonder. There is 
absolutely no synonym for it; to convey its idea in orthodox Eng¬ 
lish would take a whole sentence. And so, too, with certain single 


TENDENCIES IN AMERICAN 


197 


words of metaphorical origin: barrel for large and illicit wealth, 
pork for unnecessary and dishonest appropriations of public money, 
joint for illegal liquor-house, tenderloin for gay and dubious neigh¬ 
borhood . 57 Many of these, and of the new compounds with them, 
belong to the vocabulary of disparagement, e. g., bone-head, skunk, 
bug, jay, lobster, boob, mutt, gas (empty talk), geezer, piker, baggage- 
smasher, hashrslinger, clock-watcher, four-flusher, coffin-nail, chin- 
music, batty and one-horse. Here an essential character of the Amer¬ 
ican shows itself: his tendency to combat the disagreeable with irony, 
to heap ridicule upon what he is suspicious of or doesn’t under¬ 
stand . 58 

The rapidity with which new verbs are made in the United States 
is really quite amazing. Two days after the first regulations of 
the Food Administration were announced, to hooverize appeared 
spontaneously in scores of newspapers, and a week later it was 
employed without any visible sense of its novelty in the debates of 
Congress and had taken on a respectability equal to that of to bryan- 
ize, to fletcherize and to oslerize. To electrocute appeared inevitably 
in the first public discussion of capital punishment by electricity; 
to ku klux came in with the Klan; to commute no doubt accom¬ 
panied the first commutation ticket; to insurge attended the birth of 
the Progressive balderdash. Of late the old affix -ize, once fecund 
of such monsters as to funeralize, has come into favor again, and I 
note, among its other products, to belgiumize, to vacationize, to 
picturize, to scenarioize, to cohanize , 69 to citizenize and to institu¬ 
tionalize. But often the noun or adjective is used in its original form, 
without any attempt at explanatory inflection. Thus, I have en- 

w ThiB use of tenderloin is ascribed to Alexander (alias "Clubber”) Williams, 
a New York police captain. Vide the Neic York Sun, July 11, 1913. Williams, 
in 1876, was transferred from an obscure precinct to West Thirtieth Street. 
"I’ve been having chuck steak ever since I’ve been on the force,” he said, "and 
now I’m going to have a bit of tenderloin.” “The name,” says the Sun, “has 
endured more than a generation, moving with the changed amusement geography 
of the city, and has been adopted in all parts of the country.” 

m Cf. Terms of Disparagement, by Marie Gladys Hayden, Dialect 'Notes, vol. 
iv, pt. iii, pp. 194 ft. Also Terms of’Disparagement in the Dialect Speech of High 
School Pupils in California and New Mexico, by Elsie L. Warnock, Dialect Notes, 
vol. v, pt. ii, pp. 60 ff. . 

“ Apparently a deliberate invention by George M. Cohan, who uses it m his 
advertising. It means to embellish a musical piece with the characteristic 
Cohan touches. In the same way the manufacturers of Neolin, a substitute for 
leather, have sought to popularize to neolinize. 


198 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


countered to census 69 to wassermann, to major (t. e., to make this 
or that subject a major study in college), to debut, to author, to 
press-agent, to sacrilege, to house-clean, to reunion, 61 to headquarters, 
to pendulum, to janitor 62 to bible 63 to program, 6 * to wimpus , 65 
and to vacation. Many such verbs are in the vocabularies 
of the arts and crafts. American librarians say that a new 
book has been accessioned, trained nurses speak of specialing, 
firemen use siamesed hoses, uplifters report that they have con¬ 
tacted with cases, 66 dealers in kitchen appliances promise to 
service them ( i . e., to keep them in repair for a definite time), and 
the managers of a well-known chain of hotels advertise that they are 
Statler-operated. The theatrical magazine, Variety, always bril¬ 
liant with novel Americanisms, uses many such verbs, e. g., to lobby- 
display ( i. e., to display photographs of a performer in a theatre 
lobby). A great boldness shows itself in the making of these new 
verbs. To demote, when it came in during the war, was scarcely 
challenged. To renig, a few years before, had been fashioned, as a 
matter of course, from renegade by back-formation, and at the 
start it was to renege. To knock, to rattle, to roast and to pan, 
when they appeared, were accepted without question as 

quite regular. I have found to s o s, in the form of its 

gerund. 67 To loan, still under the ban in England, has been 
long in very respectable use in the United States. I have observed 
its employment by a vice-president of the National City Bank of 
New York, 68 by the dramatic critic of the Nation, 69 and by the 

80 New International Encyclopedia, vol. xiv, p. 674. 

61 Freeman, May 12, 1920, p. 211, col. 1. It is apparently acquiring a short¬ 
ened form, to reune. 

83 Semi-Centennial Anniversary Book, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Neb., 
1919, p. 43. 

63 Used by the Gideon Society to denote the act of outfitting a hotel with 
Bibles for the use of its guests. 

64 Used by the vaudeville theatres of the Keith circuit. 

85 Used by the New York Herald in its shipping news to denote a stiffening of 
rates. It seems to be derived from the noun, loimp'us, the meaning of which I 
refuse, on the advice of counsel, to state. 

“See a statement by the Interdepartmental Social Hygiene Board, Congres¬ 
sional Record, June 28, 1919, p. 2105, col. 1. 

87 New York Evening Mail, Feb. 2, 1918, p. 1. 

88 George E. Roberts, Nation’s Business, Oct., 1920, p. 2, col. 1. 

“Ludwig Lewisohn, in his translation of Wassermann’s The World’s Illusion; 

New York, 1920. It has even got into law. See the Congressional Record, Dec. 
19, 1921, p. 592, col. 2. 


TENDENCIES IN AMERICAN 


199 


secretary of the Poetry Society of America. 70 Where a verb differs 
etymologically from its corresponding noun or is otherwise felt to 
be clumsy or pedantic, the tendency seems to be to dispose of the 
difference by manufacturing a new verb. Examples are afforded by 
to injunct, to steam-roller and to operate (transitive). To injunct, 
I note, has begun to crowd out to enjoin; it is obviously more in har¬ 
mony with its noun, injunction. To steam-roller early displaced 
to steam-roll . 71 As for to operate, the Journal of the American 
Medical Association w y ars upon it in vain. More and more, sur¬ 
geons report that they operated a patient, not on him. 

This last example, however, violates one tendency almost as clearly 
as it shows another. In general, the English habit of hitching a prepo¬ 
sition to a verb is carried to even greater lengths in America than 
it is in England. The colloquial language is very rich in such 
compounds, and some of them have come to have special mean¬ 
ings. Compare, for example, to give and to give out, to go bach and 
to go bach on, to light and to light out, to butt and to butt in, to 
turn and to turn down, to go and to go big, to show and to show 
up, to put and to put over, to wind and to wind up. Sometimes, 
however, the addition seems to be merely rhetorical, as in to start 
off, to finish up, to open up, to beat up (or out), to try out, to 
stop over (or off), and to hurry up. To hurry up is so common¬ 
place in America that everyone uses it and no one notices it, but 
it remains rare in England. Up seems to be essential to many of 
these latter-day verbs, e. g., to pony up, to doll up, to ball up; with¬ 
out it they lack significance. Sometimes unmistakable adverbs 
are substituted for prepositions, as in to stay put and to call 
down. “Brush your hat off” would seem absurd to an Englishman; 
so would “The Committee reported out the bill.” Nearly all of these 
reinforced verbs are supported by corresponding adjectives and 
nouns, e. g., cut-up, show-down, hich-in, come-down, hand-out, start- 
off, wind-up, run-in, balled-up, dolled-up, bang-up, turn-down, frame- 
up, stop-over, jump-off, call-down, buttinshi. 

The rapidity wfith which words move through the parts of speech 

70 Jessie B. Rittenhouse, Poetry, Jan., 1921, p. 229. 

"Similarly the agent noun derived from the New Thought is not New Thinker 
but New Thoughter. 




200 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


must be observed by every student of American. The case of bum 
I have already cited: it is noun, adjective, verb and adverb. The 
adjective lonesome, in “all by her lonesome/’ becomes a sort of pro¬ 
noun. The verb to think, in “he had another think coming,” be¬ 
comes a noun. Jitney is an old American noun lately revived; a 
month after its revival it was also an adjective, and before long it 
will be a verb. From it has been derived the agent-noun, 
jitneurJ 2 To lift up was turned tail first and made a substan¬ 
tive, and is now also an adjective and a verb. Joy-ride became a 
verb the day after it was born as a noun. So did auto and phone. 
So did the adjective, a. w. o. 1. So did pep, as in “at last 
he is pepping up.” Immediately the Workmen’s Compensa¬ 
tion Act began to appear on the statute-books of the States, 
the adjective compensable was born. Other adjectives are made by 
the simple process of adding -y to nouns, e. g., classy, tasty, tony. 
And what of livest? An astounding inflection, indeed—but with 
quite sound American usage behind it. The Metropolitan Magazine, 
of which Col. Roosevelt was an editor, announces on its letter paper 
that it is “the livest magazine in America,” and Poetry, the organ 
of the new poetry movement, used to print at the head of its con¬ 
tents page the following encomium from the New York Tribune: 
“the livest art in America today is poetry, and the livest expression 
of that art is in this little Chicago monthly.” 

We have seen how readily new prefixes and affixes are adopted 
in America. Often a whole word is thus put to service, and such 
amalgamations produce many new words. Thus smith threatens to 
breed a long series of new agent norms, e. g., ad-smith, joke-smith; 
and fiend (a characteristic American hyperbole) has already produced 
a great many, e. g., movie-fiend, drug-fiend, bridge-fiend, golf-fiend, 
coke-fiend, kissing-fiend. Moreover, there is no impediment to their 
almost infinite multiplication. If some enterprising shoe-repairer 
began calling himself a shoe-smith tomorrow no one would think to 
protest against the neologism, and if some new game were introduced 
from abroad, say the German Skat, the corresponding fiend would 
come with it. Always the effort is to dispose of a long explanatory 
phrase by substituting a succinct and concrete term. This effort 
” Detroit News, March 2, 1922, p. 2. 


TENDENCIES IN AMERICAN 


201 


is responsible for many whole classes of compounds, e. g., the hos¬ 
pital series: doll-hospital, china-hospital, camera-hospital, pipe-hos¬ 
pital, etc. It is responsible, too, for many somewhat startling de¬ 
rivatives, e. g., mixologist and tuberculogian , 73 And it lies behind 
the invention of many words that are not compounds, but boldly 
put forth new roots, many of them etymologically unintelligible, 
e. g., jazz, jinx, hobo, 7i woozy, goo-goo (eyes), ho ahum, sundae. A 
large number of characteristic Americanisms are deliberate inven¬ 
tions, devised to designate new objects or to clothe old objects with 
a special character. The American advertiser is an extraordinarily 
diligent manufacturer of such terms, and many of his coinages, 
e. g., hodah, vaseline, listerine, postum, carborundum, hlaxon, jap-a- 
lac, pianola, victrola, dictograph and uneeda are quite as familiar to 
all Americans as tractor or soda-mint, and have come into general 
acceptance as common nouns. The Eastman Kodak Company, in¬ 
deed, has sometimes had to call attention to the fact that hodah is 
its legal property, and in the same way the Chesebrough Manufactur¬ 
ing Company has had to protect vaseline. 75 Dr. Louise Pound has 
made an interesting study of these artificial trade-names. 76 They 
fall, she finds, into a number of well defined classes. There are the 
terms that are simple derivatives from proper names, e. g., listerine, 
postum, hlaxon; the shortenings, e. g., jell-o, jap-a-lac; the extensions 
with common suffixes, e. g., alabastine, protectograph, dictograph, 
orangeade, crispette, pearline, electrolier; the extensions with new 
or fanciful suffixes, e. g., resinol, thermos, grafonola, shinola, sapolio, 
lysol, neolin, crisco; the diminutives, e. g., cascaret, wheatlet, chiclet; 
the simple compounds, e. g., palmolive, spearmint, peptomint, auto- 

”1 encounter this in The Campaign, a magazine published by the Health 
Department of Iowa. 

74 An etymology for hobo is suggested by H. R. Jeffrey in Dialect Notes, vol. 
v, pt. iii (1920), p. 86. As for jazz, see English, May-June, 1919, p. 90. 

75 Kodak had even got into the Continental languages. In October, 1917, the 
Verband Deutscher Amateurphotographen-Vereine was moved to issue the fol¬ 
lowing warning: “Es giebt keine deutschen Kodaks. Kodak, als Sammelname fur 
photographische Erzeugnisse, ist falsch und bezeichnet nur die Fabrikate der 
Eastman-E'odofc-Company. Wer von einem Kodak spricht und nur allgemein 
eine photographische Kamera meint, bedenkt nicht, dass er mit der Weiterver- 
breitung dieses Wortes die deutsche Industrie zugunsten der amerikanisch- 
englischen schadigt.” In American there are a number of familiar derivatives, 
e. g., to kodak, kodaker, kodak-fiend. 

7,1 Word-Coinage and Modern Trade Names, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. i (1913), 

pp. 29-41. 


202 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


car; the blends, e. g., cuticura, damaskeene, locomobile , 77 mobiloil; 
the blends made of proper names, e. g., Oldsmobile, Hupmobile, Valr 
spar; the blends made of parts of syllables or simple initials, e. g., 
Reo, nabisco; the terms involving substitution, e. g., triscuit; and the 
arbitrary formations, e. g., lcodak, tiz, clysmic, vivil. Dr. Brander 
Matthews once published an Horatian ode, of unknown authorship, 
made up of such inventions. 78 I transcribe it for the joy of connois¬ 
seurs : 


Chipeco thermos dioxygen, temco sonora tuxedo 
Resinol fiat bacardi, camera ansco wheatena; 

Antiskid pebeco calox, oleo tyco barometer 
Postum nabisco! 

Prestolite arco congoleum, karo aluminum kryptok, 

Crisco balopticon lysol, jello bellans, carborundum! 

Ampico clysmic swoboda, pantasote necco britannica 
Encyclopaedia ? 

One of the words here used is not American, but Italian, i. e., 
fiat, a blend made of the initials of Fabbrica Italiano Automobili 
Torino; most of the others are quite familiar to all Americans. 
“But only a few of them,” says Dr. Matthews, “would evoke recog¬ 
nition from an Englishman; and what a Frenchman or a German 
would make out of the eight lines is beyond human power even 
to guess. Corresponding words have been devised in France and 
in Germany, but only infrequently; and apparently the invention 
of trade-mark names is not a customary procedure on the part of 
foreign advertisers. The British, although less affluent in this re¬ 
spect than we are, seem to be a little more inclined to employ the 
device than their competitors on the continent. Every American, 
traveling on the railways which converge upon London, must have 
experienced a difficulty in discovering whether the station at which 
his train has paused is Stoke Pogis or Bovril, Chipping Horton or 
Mazzawattee. Hone the less it is safe to say that the concoction of 

77 This is, of course, purely a trade-name, but in Section 2125 of the new 
Virginia Code it is given as a synonym for automobile. If there were laws 
regulating amateur photographers, no doubt kodak would appear as a synonym 
for camera. 

78 The Advertiser’s Artful Aid, Bookman, Feb., 1919, p. 659 ff. See also 
Word-Coinage, by Leon Mead; New York, n. d., and Burgess Unabridged, by 
Gelett Burgess; Hew York, 1914. 


TENDENCIES IN AMERICAN 


203 


a similar ode by the aid of the trade-mark words invented in the 
British Isles would be a task of great difficulty on account of the 
paucity of terms sufficiently artificial to bestow the exotic remoteness 
which is accountable for the aroma of the American ‘ode’.” 

Of analogous character are artificial words of the scalawag and 
rambunctious class, the formation of which constantly goes on. 
Some of them are telescope forms: grandificent (from grand and 
magnificent ), sodalicious (from soda and delicious) and warphan 
[age] (from war and orphan [age]). Others are made up of com¬ 
mon roots and grotesque affixes: swelldoodle, splendiferous and 
peacharino. Others are arbitrary reversals, as sockdolager from 
doxologer. Yet others are stretch forms or mere extravagant in¬ 
ventions: scallywampus, supergobsloptious and floozy Many of 
these are devised by advertisement writers or college students and 
belong properly to slang, but there is a steady movement of selected 
specimens into the common vocabulary. The words in -doodle hint 
at German influences, and those in -ino owe something to Italian 
or maybe to Spanish. Two other words, frequently in use, deserve 
notice. One is phoney and the other is moron. The former is 
applied to cheap, brummagem jewelry. All of the American dic¬ 
tionaries list it, but none of them accounts for its origin. Webster 
suggests somewhat vaguely that it may be related to funny. An¬ 
other etymologist believes that it is derived from telephone, and 
ventures upon the strained theory that “a statement is phoney if it 
is like the practical jokes and false impersonations that are so fre¬ 
quently perpetrated over the telephone.” 80 But I am informed by 
a jeweler that it really comes from Forney, the name of a manu¬ 
facturer of cheap jewelry. This manufacturer made a specialty 
of supplying brass rings, in barrel lots, to street pedlars, and such 
rings, among the fraternity, came to be known as Forney rings. 
The extension of the designation to all cheap jewelry and its 
modification to phoney by the law of Hobson-Jobson followed. 
Moron, which has been in common use in the United States ever 
since the Army psychological tests showed that nearly 50% of the 

79 Cf. Some English “Stretch Forms,” by Louise Pound, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, 
pt. i, p. 52. Also Terms of Approbation and Eulogy, by Elsie L. Warnock, Dialect 
Notes, vol. iv, pt. i, p. 13 ff. 

80 Boston Traveler, Feb. 20, 1922 (editorial). 


204 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


conscripts of 1917 and 1918 were deficient mentally, means an 
adult whose mentality is that of a child of between 7 and 12 years. 
It was adopted in 1910 by the American Association for the Study 
of the Feebleminded. 81 It is derived from the Greek word moros, 
which is also one of the roots of sophomore. Moron, by the way, is 
the name of one of the characters in Moliere’s “La Princesse 
d’Elide” (1665). 82 


4 . 

Foreign Influences Today 

The extent of foreign influences upon the development of 
American, and particularly spoken American, is often underes¬ 
timated. In no other large nation of the world are there so 
many aliens, nor is there any other in which so large a proportion 
of the resident aliens speak languages incomprehensible to the native. 
Since 1820 nearly 35,000,000 immigrants have come into this coun¬ 
try, and of them probably not 10,000,000 brought any preliminary 
acquaintance with English with them. The census of 1910 showed 
that nearly 1,500,000 persons then living permanently on American 
soil could not speak it at all; that more than 13,000,000 had been 
born in other countries, chiefly of different language, 83 and that 
nearly 20,000,000 were the children of such immigrants, and hence 
under the influence of their speech habits. No other country houses 
so many aliens. In Great Britain the alien population, for a century 
past, has never been more than 2 per cent of the total population, 
and since the passage of the Aliens Act of 1905 it has tended to 
decline steadily. In Germany, in 1910, there were but 1,259,873 
aliens in a population of more than 60,000,000, and of these nearly 
half were German-speaking Austrians and Swiss. In France, in 
1906, there were 1,000,000 foreigners in a population of 39,000,000 
and a third of them were French-speaking Belgians, Luxembour- 

81 Journal American Medical Association, Jan. 7, 1922. 

” Ibid., March 4, 1922. 

"As I write the 1920 returns are not complete. But a preliminary bulletin 
shows there were 13,712,754 foreign-born whites in the country that year, of 
whom less than 3,000,000 came from countries of English speech. 



TENDENCIES IN AMERICAN 


205 


geois and Swiss. In Italy, in 1911, there were but 350,000 in a 
population of 35,000,000. 

This large and constantly reinforced admixture of foreigners has 
naturally exerted a constant pressure upon the national language, 
for the majority of them, at least in the first generation, have found 
it quite impossible to acquire it in any purity, and even their chil¬ 
dren have grown up with speech habits differing radically from those 
of correct English. The effects of this pressure are obviously two¬ 
fold; on the one hand the foreigner, struggling with a strange and 
difficult tongue, makes efforts to simplify it as much as possible, 
and so strengthens the native tendency to disregard all niceties and 
complexities, and on the other hand he corrupts it with words and 
locutions from the language he has brought with him, and some¬ 
times with whole idioms and grammatical forms. We have seen, in 
earlier chapters, how the Dutch and French of colonial days en¬ 
riched the vocabulary of the colonists, how the German immigrants 
of the first half of the nineteenth century enriched it still further, 
and how the Irish of the same period influenced its everyday usages. 
The same process is still going on. The Italians, the Slavs, and 
above all, the Russian Jews, make steady contributions to the Ameri¬ 
can vocabulary and idiom, and though these contributions are often 
concealed by quick and complete naturalization their foreignness to 
English remains none the less obvious. I should worry , 84 in its 
way, is correct English, but in essence it is as completely Yiddish as 
kosher, ganof, schadchen, oi-yoi, matzoth or mazuma , 85 

The extent of such influences remains to be studied; in the whole 
literature I can find but one formal article upon the subject. That 


84 In Yiddish, ish ka bibble. The origin and meaning of the phrase have been 
variously explained. One theory is to the effect that it is a Yiddish corruption 
of the German nicht gefiedelt (=not fiddled=not flustered). But this seems to 
me to be fanciful. To the Jews ish is probably the first personal pronoun and ka 
appears to be a corruption of kann. As for bibble, I suspect that it is the off¬ 
spring of bedibbert (=embarrassed, intimidated). The phrase thus has an iron¬ 
ical meaning, I should be embarrassed, almost precisely equivalent to I should 
worry. 

85 All of which, of course, are coming into American, along with many other 
Yiddish words. These words tend to spread far beyond the areas actually set¬ 
tled by Jews. Thus I find mazuma in a Word-List from Kansas, from the collec¬ 
tanea of Judge J. C. Ruppenthal, of Bussell, Kansas, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, 
pt. v, 1916, p. 322. 



206 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


article 86 deals specifically with the suffix -fest, which came into 
American from the German and was probably suggested by familiar¬ 
ity with sdngerfest. There is no mention of it in any of the diction¬ 
aries of Americanisms, and yet, in such forms as talkfest, gabfest 81 
swatfest and hooclifest, it is met with almost daily. So with - heimer, 
-inski and -bund. Several years ago -heimer had a great vogue in 
slang, and was rapidly done to death. But wiseheimer remains in 
colloquial use as a facetious synonym for smart-aleck, and after 
awhile it may gradually acquire dignity. Bar lowlier words, in 
fact, have worked their way in. Buttinski, perhaps, is going the 
same route. As for the words in -bund, many of them are already 
almost accepted. Plunder-bund is now at least as good as pork-bar¬ 
rel and slush-fund, and money-bund is frequently heard in Con¬ 
gress. 88 Such locutions creep in stealthily, and are secure before 
they are suspected. Current slang, out of which the more decorous 
language dredges a large part of its raw materials, is full of them. 
Nix and nixy, 89 for no, are debased forms of the German nicht; aber 
nit, once as popular as camouflage, is obviously aber nicht. And a 
steady flow of nouns, all needed to designate objects introduced by 
immigrants, enriches the vocabulary. The Hungarians not only 
brought their national condiment with them; they also brought its 
name, paprika, and that name is now thoroughly American, as is 

84 Louise Pound: Domestication of the Suffix -fest, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. v, 
1916. Dr. Pound, it should be mentioned, has also printed a brief note on 
-inski. 

87 A writer in The Editor and Publisher for Dec. 25, 1919, p. 30, credits the 
first use of gabfest to the late Joseph S. McCullagh, editor of the St. Louis 
Globe-Democrat. He says: “McCullagh coined the word while writing a com¬ 
ment upon an unusually prolonged and empty debate in Congress. No other 
word in the dictionary or out of it seemed to fit the case so well, and as a great 
percentage of the readers of the Globe-Democrat throughout the Central West 
were of German birth or origin, gabfest was seized upon with hearty zest, and 
it is today very generally applied to any protracted and particularly loquacious 
gathering.” A recent Western variant is bullfest. Bull, of course, is used 
in the familiar sense of eloquent and insincere rhetoric. 

“For example, see the Congressional Record for April 3, 1918, p. 4928. 

88 In the Postoffice Department nixie is applied to “all mail matter not 
addressed to a postoffice, or addressed to a postoffice without the name of a 
state being given, or otherwise so incorrectly, illegibly, indefinitely or insuffi¬ 
ciently addressed that it cannot be transmitted.” (Sec. 1639, Postal Laws and 
Regulations). Nixies are returned to the postmaster at the headquarters of the 
division superintendent, and the regulations require that each must be accom¬ 
panied by a slip bearing the word nixie. The First Assistant Postmaster- 
General informs me that the Department has no record showing when the word 
was introduced. 



TENDENCIES IN AMERICAN 


207 


goulash. 00 In the same way the Italians brought in camorra, pad¬ 
rone, spaghetti, chianti, and other substantives, 91 and the Jews made 
contributions from Yiddish and Hebrew and greatly reinforced cer¬ 
tain old borrowings from German. 92 Once such a loan-word gets in- 
it takes firm root. During the first year of American participation 
in the World War an effort was made on patriotic grounds to sub¬ 
stitute liberty-cabbage for sauer-kraut, but it quickly failed, for the 
name had become as completely Americanized as the thing itself, 
and so liberty-cabbage seemed affected and absurd. 93 In the same 
way a great many other German words survived the passions of the 
time. Nor could all the ardor of the professional patriots obliterate 
that German influence which has fastened upon the American yes 
something of the quality of ja, or prevent the constant appearance of 
such German loan-forms as “it listens well” and “I want out.” Many 
American loan-words are of startlingly outlandish origin. Hooch, 
according to a recent writer, 94 is from a northwestern Indian lan¬ 
guage, and so is skookum. Cuspidor, a typical Americanism, is from 
the Portuguese cuspador, one who spits. 95 

Constant familiarity with such immigrants from foreign lan¬ 
guages and with the general speech habits of foreign peoples has 
made American a good deal more hospitable to loan-words than Eng¬ 
lish, even in the absence of special pressure. Let the same word 
knock at the gates of the two languages, and American will admit 
it more readily, and give it at once a wider and more intimate cur¬ 
rency. Examples are afforded by cafe, vaudeville, revue, employe, 
boulevard, cabaret, expose, kindergarten, depot, fete, and menu. 


80 Paprika is in the Standard Dictionary, but I have been unable to find it in 
any English dictionary. Another such word is kimono, from the Japanese. 

“Including, so Dr. Arthur Livingston tells me, policy (the name of the gam¬ 
bling game). Dr. Livingston believes that policy is from polizza, which is 
immigrant Italian for the ticket used in a lottery. 

83 Many words of 'Yiddish origin have got into American thieves’ slang, e.g., 
schlock, meaning junk; sioatoh , meaning a sample which a thief offers to a 
receiver of stolen goods, and kibbets, meaning a syndicate of small dealers 
formed to buy stolen goods. 

83 According to the Saturday Review, March 5, 1922, p. 314, unencrsohnitzel 
was turned into American-pie in England at the same time. It also failed to 
survive. 

w Writer's Monthly, March, 1921, p. 251. 

85 A correspondent tells me that it was introduced by James Connolly, of New 
York, a manufacturer of spittoons. 



208 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


Cafe, in American, is a word of mucli larger and more varied mean¬ 
ing than in English and is used much more frequently, and by many 
more persons. So is employe, in the naturalized form of employee. 
So is toilet: we have even seen it as a euphemism for native terms that 
otherwise would be in daily use. So is kindergarten: during the 
war I read of a kindergarten for the elementary instruction of con¬ 
scripts. Such words are not unknown to the Englishman, but when 
he uses them it is with a plain sense of their foreignness. In Ameri¬ 
can they are completely naturalized, as is shown by the spelling and 
pronunciation of most of them. An American would no more think 
of attempting the correct French pronunciation of depot (though 
he always makes the final t silent), or of putting the French ac¬ 
cents upon it than he would think of spelling toilet with the final te 
or of essaying to pronounce Munchner in the German manner. 
Often curious battles go on between such loan-words and their Eng¬ 
lish equivalents, and with varying fortunes. In 1895 Weber and 
Fields tried to establish music-hall in !New York, but it quickly 
succumbed to vaudeville-theatre, as variety had succumbed to vaude¬ 
ville before it. In the same way lawn-fete (without the circumflex 
accent, and sometimes, alas, pronounced feet ) has elbowed out the 
English garden-party. But now and then, when the competing loan¬ 
word happens to violate American speech habits, a native term ousts 
it. The French creche offers an example; it has been entirely dis¬ 
placed by day-nursery. 

The English, in this matter, display their greater conservatism 
very plainly. Even when a loan-word enters both English and 
American simultaneously a sense of foreignness lingers about it on 
the other side of the Atlantic much longer than on this side, and it 
is used with far more self-consciousness. The word matinee offers 
a convenient example. To this day the English commonly print it 
in italics, give it its French accent, and pronounce it with some at¬ 
tempt at the French manner. But in America it is entirely natural¬ 
ized, and the most ignorant man uses it without any feeling that 
it is strange. Often a loan-word loses all signs of its original for¬ 
eignness. For example, there is shimmy, a conniption of both 
chemise and chemin (de fer) , the name of a card game: it has lost 


TENDENCIES IN AMERICAN 


209 


both its original forms and, in one sense, its original meaning. 96 
The same lack of any sense of linguistic integrity is to be noticed 
in many other directions—for example, in the freedom with which 
the Latin per is used with native nouns. One constantly sees per 
day, per dozen, per hundred, per mile, etc., in American newspapers, 
even the most careful, but in England the more seemly a is almost 
always used, or the noun itself is made Latin, as in per diem. 91 Per, 
in fact, is fast becoming an everyday American word. Such phrases 
as “as per your letter (or order) of the 15th inst.” are met with inces¬ 
santly in business correspondence. The same greater hospitality is 
shown by the readiness wdth which various un-English prefixes and 
affixes come into fashion, for example, super- and -itis. The Eng¬ 
lish accept them gingerly; the Americans take them in with en¬ 
thusiasm, and naturalize them instanter. 98 

The pressure of loan-words, of course, is greatest in those areas 
in which the foreign population is largest. In some of these areas 
it has given rise to what are almost distinct dialects. Everyone 
who has ever visited lower Pennsylvania must have observed the 
wide use of German terms by the natives, and the German intona¬ 
tions in their speech, even when they are most careful with their 
English. 99 In the same way, the English of everyday life in Hew 
Orleans is full of French terms, e. g., praline, brioche, lagniappe, 
armoir, hruxingiol (— croquignole ), pooldoo (= poule d J eau ), 100 
and the common speech of the Southwest is heavy with debased Span¬ 
ish, e. g., alamo, arroyo, chaparral, caballero, camino, jornada, 
frijole, presidio, serape, hombre, quien sabe, vamose. 101 As in the 
early days of settlement, there is a constant movement of favored 
loan-words into the general speech of the country. Hooch, from 
the Chinook, was for long a localism in the Northwest; suddenly 

** Cf. The Jocularization of French Words and Phrases in Present Day Ameri¬ 
can Speech, by Louise Pound, Dialect Notes, vol. v, p. iii, 1920. 

w Of late there has arisen a fashion in the United States of using the in 
place of a, as in “five cents the copy.” It is an affectation, but somewhat better 
than the use of per. 

98 Cf. Vogue Affixes in Present-Day 'Word-Coinage, by Louise Pound, Dialect 
Notes, vol. v, pt. i, 1918. Dr. Pound ascribes the vogue of super - to German 
influences. See also The Cult of Super, Boston Globe, Aug. 31, 1921. 

“See Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 157; ibid., p. 337. 

100 See Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 268; ibid., p. 346; ibid., p. 420. 

301 See three articles by the late Prof. H. Talliehet in Dialect Notes, vol. i, 
p. 185, p. 243 and p. 324. 



210 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


it appeared everywhere. So with certain Chinese and Japanese 
words that- have, within late years, entered the general speech from 
the speech of California. New York has been the port of entry for 
most of the new Yiddish and Italian loan-words, as it was the port 
of entry for Irishisms seventy years ago. In Michigan the .natives 
begin to borrow from the Dutch settlers and may later on pass on 
their borrowings to the rest of the country; in the prairie states many 
loan-words from the Scandinavian languages are already in use; in 
Kansas there are even traces of Russian influence. 102 

In the Philippines and in Hawaii American naturally shows even 
greater hospitality to loan-words; in both 1 places distinct dialects 
have been developed, quite unintelligible to the newcomer from 
home. Maurice P. Dunlap 103 offers the following specimen of a 
conversation between two Americans long resident in Manila: 

Hola, amigo. 

Komusta kayo. 

Porque were you h-ablaing with ese sehoritaf 

She wanted a job as lavandera. 

Cu-anto? 

Ten cents, conant, a piece, so I told her no kerry. 

Have you had chow? Well, spera, till I sign this chit and I’ll take a paseo 
with you. 


Here we have an example of Philippine American that shows all 
the tendencies of American Yiddish. It retains the general forms 
of American, but in the short conversation, embracing but 41 .differ¬ 
ent words, there are eight loan-words from the Spanish ( [hola, amigo, 
porque, ese, sehorita, lavandera\, cuanto and paseo), two Spanish 
locutions in a debased form (spera for espera and no kerry for no 
quiero), two loan-words from the Tagalog ( komusta and kayo), 10 * 
two from Pidgin English ( chow and chit), one Philippine-American 
localism {conant), and a Spanish verb with an English inflection 
( liablaing). 

102 Of. Russian Words in Kansas, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 161. 

103 What Americans Talk in the Philippines, American Review of Reviews 
Aug., 1913. 

104 But here komusta may be borrowed from the Spanish como esta (= how 
are you?). 


TENDENCIES IN AMERICAN 


211 


The American dialect developed in Hawaii is thus described ‘by 
a writer in the Christian Science Monitor , 105 

Honolulu, despite the score or more of races which intermingle in absolute 
harmony, is a strictly American community. English is the language which 
predominates; and yet there are perhaps a hundred or more Hawaiian words 
which are used by everyone, almost exclusively, in preference to those English 
words of similar meaning. 

“Are you pau?” asks the American housekeeper of her Japanese yard man. 

“All pau,” he responds. 

The housekeeper has asked if the yard man is through. He has replied that 
he is. She would not think of asking, “Are you through?” Pau —pronounced 
pov> —as used in Honolulu conveys just as much meaning to the Honolulan as 
the English 108 word through. It is one of the commonest of the Hawaiian words 
used today. 

In Honolulu one does not say “the northwest corner of Fort and Hotel Streets.” 
One says “the makai-ewa corner.” Makai means toward the sea. Ewa means 
toward the north or in the direction of the big Ewa plantation which lies 
toward the north of Honolulu. Thus the makai-ewa corner means that corner 
which is on the seaward side and toward Ewa. Instead of saying east or the 
direction in which the sun rises, Honolulans say mauka , which means toward the 
mountains. To designate south, they say waikiki, which means toward Diamond 
Head or Waikiki Beach. 

One often hears a little boy say he has a puka in his stocking. The house¬ 
keeper directs the yard man to put the rubbish in the puka. It is a simple 
Hawaiian word meaning hole. Another common word is lanai. In English it 
means porch or veranda. One never says, “Come out on the porch,” but “Come 
out on the lanai.” 

The two words pahea oe are used as a term of greeting. In the States they 
say, “How do you do?” “How are you?” or “Good day.” In Honolulu, “ Pahea 
oe?” conveys the same meaning. The response is Maikai no, or “Very good,” 
or “All right.” 

On the mainland the word aloha is not new. It is used as a word of greet¬ 
ing or as a word of farewell. “Aloha oe” may mean “Farewell to you,” “How 
are you?” or “Good day.” The word is not as common among the Americans 
as some of the others, but is used to a more exclusive extent by the Hawaiians. 

A large number of Americans have an entirely wrong interpretation of the 
word kanaka. In its truest and only sense it means man. It can be interpreted 
in no other way. In Hawaiian a man is a kanaka, a woman a wahine. The 
word kane is also often used as man, and coupled with the word keiki—keiki 
kane —means hoy. The Hawaiians have often been referred to as kanakas, 
which on the mainland has developed into more or less of a slang word to 
designate the people of the Hawaiian race. This, however, is totally incorrect. 

The kamaavna, or old-timer, usually refers to his hat as his papale. His 
house is his hale, and his food is usually designated as kaukau, although this 

105 Unluckily, I have been unable to determine the writer’s name or the date. 

100 That is, American; through, in this sense, is seldom used by the English. 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


212 

is not a Hawaiian word. There are perhaps a hundred other such words which 
are used daily in preference to those which mean the same in English. 

The immigrant in the midst of a large native population, of 
course, exerts no such pressure upon the national language as that 
exerted upon an i mm igrant language by the native, but nevertheless 
his linguistic habits and limitations have to be reckoned with in 
dealing with him, and the concessions thus made necessary have a 
very ponderable influence upon the general speech. Of much im¬ 
portance is the support given to a native tendency by the foreigner’s 
incapacity for employing (or even comprehending) syntax of any 
complexity, or words not of the simplest. This is the tendency 
toward succinctness and clarity, at whatever sacrifice of grace. One 
English observer, Sidney Low, puts the chief blame for the general 
explosiveness of American upon the immigrant, who must be com¬ 
municated with in the plainest words available, and is not socially 
worthy of the suavity of circumlocution anyhow r . 107 In his turn the 
immigrant seizes upon these plainest words as upon a sort of con¬ 
venient Lingua Franca—his quick adoption of damn as a universal 
adjective is traditional—and throws his influence upon the side of 
the underlying speech habit when he gets on in the vulgate. Many 
characteristic Americanisms of the sort to stagger lexicographers— 
for example, near-silk —have come from the Jews, whose progress 
in business is a good deal faster than their progress in English. 

10T The American People, 2 vols.; New York, 1909-11, vol. ii, pp. 449-50. For 
a discussion of this effect of contact with foreigners upon a language see also 
Beach-la-Mar, by William Churchill; Washington, 1911, p. 11 ff. 


VII. 


THE STANDARD AMERICAN PRONUNCIATION 

1 . 

General Characters 

“Language,” said Sayce, in 1879, “does not consist of letters, 
but of sounds, and until this fact has been brought home to us our 
study of it will be little better than an exercise of memory.” 1 The 
theory, at that time, was somewhat strange to English grammarians 
and etymologists, despite the investigations of A. J. Ellis and the 
massive lesson of Grimm’s law; their labors were largely wasted 
upon deductions from the written word. But since then, chiefly 
under the influence of German philologists, they have turned from 
orthographical futilities to the actual sounds of the tongue, and 
the latest and best native grammar, that of Sweet, is frankly based 
upon the spoken English of educated Englishmen—not, remember, of 
conscious purists, but of the general body of cultivated folk. Un¬ 
luckily, this new method also has its disadvantages. The men oRa 
given race and time usually write a good deal alike, or, at all events, 
attempt to write alike, but in their oral speech there are wide varia¬ 
tions. “No two persons,” says a leading contemporary authority 
upon English phonetics, 2 “pronounce exactly alike.” Moreover, 
“even the best speaker commonly uses more than one style.” The 
result is that it is extremely difficult to determine the prevailing 
pronunciation of a given combination of letters at any time and 
place. The persons whose speech is studied pronounce it with minute 
shades of difference, and admit other differences according as they 
are conversing naturally or endeavoring to exhibit their pronuncia- 
1 The Science of Language, vol. ii, p. 339. 

2 Daniel Jones: The Pronunciation of English, 2nd ed.; Cambridge, 1914, 
p. 1. Jones is professor of phonetics at University College, London. 

213 


214 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


tion. Worse, it is impossible to represent a great many of these 
shades in print. Sweet, trying to do it, 3 found himself, in the end, 
with a preposterous alphabet of 125 letters. Prince L.-L. Bonaparte 
more than doubled this number, and Ellis brought it to 390. 4 Other 
phonologists, English and Continental, have gone floundering into 
the same bog. The dictionary-makers, forced to a far greater 
economy of means, are brought into obscurity. The difficulties of 
the enterprise, in fact, are probably unsurmountable. It is, as 
White says, “almost impossible for one person to express to another 
by signs the sound of any word.” “Only the voice,” he goes on, “is 
capable of that; for the moment a sign is used the question arises, 
What is the value of that sign ? The sounds of words are the most 
delicate, fleeting and inapprehensible things in nature. . . . More¬ 
over, the question arises as to the capability to apprehend and dis¬ 
tinguish sounds on the part of the person whose evidence is given.” 5 
Certain German orthoepists, despairing of the printed page, have 
turned to the phonograph, and there is a Deutsche Grammophon- 
Gesellschaft in Berlin which offers records of specimen speeches in a 
great many languages and dialects, including English. The phono¬ 
graph has also been put to successful use in language teaching by 
various American correspondence schools. 

In view of all this it would be hopeless to attempt to exhibit in 
print the numerous small differences between English and American 
pronunciation, for many of them are extremely delicate and subtle, 
and only their aggregation makes them plain. According to a 
recent and very careful observer 6 the most important of them do 
not lie in pronunciation at all, properly so called, but in intonation. 
In this direction, he says, one must look for the true characters of 
“the English accent.” Despite the opinion of Krapp, a very compe¬ 
tent authority, that “the American voice in general starts on a 
higher plane, is normally pitched higher than the British voice,” 7 

•i 

* Vide his Handbook of Phonetics, p. xv ff. 

* It is given in Ellis’ Early English Pronunciation, p. 1293 ff., and in Sayce’s 
The Science of Language, vol. i, p. 353 ff. 

8 Every-Day English, p. 29. 

'Robert J. Menner: The Pronunciation of English in America, Atlantia 
Monthly, March, 1915, p. 366. 

T The Pronunciation of Standard English in America; New York, 1919, p. 50. 
For White, see Words and Their Uses, p. 58. 


THE STANDARD AMERICAN PRONUNCIATION 


215 


I incline to agree with White that the contrary is the case. The 
nasal twang which Englishmen observe in vox Americana, though 
it has high overtones, is itself not high pitched, but rather low 
pitched, as all constrained and muffled tones are apt to be. The 
causes of that twang have long engaged phonologists, and in the 
main they agree that there is a physical basis for it—that our 
generally dry climate and rapid changes of temperature produce an 
actual thickening of the membranes concerned in the production of 
sound. 8 We are, in brief, a somewhat snuffling people, and much 
more given to catarrhs and coryzas than the inhabitants of damp 
Britain. Perhaps this general impediment to free and easy utter¬ 
ance, subconsciously apprehended, is responsible both for the levelness 
of tone of American speech, noted by Krapp, and for the American 
tendency to pronounce the separate syllables of a word with much 
more care than an Englishman bestows upon them. “To British 
ears,” says Krapp, 9 “American speech often sounds hesitating, monot¬ 
onous and indecisive, and British speech, on the other hand, is likely 
to seem to Americans abrupt, explosive and manneristic.” The 
American, in giving extraordinary six careful and distinct syllables 
instead of the Englishman’s grudging four, may be seeking to make 
up for a natural disability. Marsh, in his “Lectures on the English 
Language,” sought two other explanations of the fact. On the one 
hand, he argued that the Americans of his day read a great deal more 
than the English, and were thus much more influenced by fhe 
spelling of words, and on the other hand he pointed out that “our 
flora shows that the climate of even our Northern States belongs . . . 
to a more Southern type than that of England,” and that “in South¬ 
ern latitudes . . . articulation is generally much more distinct than 
in Northern regions.” In support of the latter proposition he cited 
the pronunciation of Spanish, Italian and Turkish, as compared with 
that of English, Danish and German—rather unfortunate examples, 

8 The following passage from Kipling’s American Notes, ch. i, will be recalled: 
“Oliver Wendell Holmes says that the Yankee schoolmarm, the cider and the 
salt codfish of the Eastern states are responsible for what he calls a nasal 
accent. I know better. They stole books from across the water without paying 
for ’em, and the snort of delight was fixed in their nostrils forever by a just 
Providence. That is why they talk a foreign tongue today.” 

“The Pronunciation of Standard English in America, p. 50. For Marsh, 
following, see lecture xxx, The English Language in America. 


216 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


for tlie pronunciation of German is at least as clear as that of 
Spanish. Swedish would have supported his case far better: the 
Swedes debase their vowels and slide over their consonants even 
more markedly than the English. Marsh believed that there was a 
tendency among Southern peoples to throw the accent toward the 
ends of words, and that this helped to bring out all the syllables. 
A superficial examination shows a number of examples of that move¬ 
ment of accent in American: advertisement, paresis, pianist, pri¬ 
marily, telegrapher, temporarily. The English accent all of these 
words on the first syllable except advertisement, which is accented 
on the second; Americans usually accent primarily and teleg¬ 
rapher on the second, temporarily and advertisement on the third, 
and paresis and pianist on the second. Again there are frontier 
and harass. The English accent the first syllables; we accent the 
second. Yet again there is the verb, to perfect. Tucker says 10 that 
its accentuation on the second syllable, “bringing it into harmony 
with perfume, cement, desert, present, produce, progress, project, 
rebel, record, and other words which are accented on the final syllable 
when used as verbs, originated in this country.” But when all these 
examples have been marshalled, the fact remains that there are just 
as many examples, and perhaps many more, of an exactly contrary 
tendency. The chief movement in American, in truth, would seem 
to be toward throwing the accent upon the first syllable. I recall 
mamma, papa, inquiry, ally, recess, details, idea, alloy, deficit, armi¬ 
stice and adult; I might add defect, excess, address, magazine, decoy 
and romance. 

A factor which may have had a great deal to do with the estab¬ 
lishment of precise habits of pronunciation in the United States 
is discussed at length by Henry Cecil Wyld, in his “History of 
Modern Colloquial English.” 11 This factor, he says, has been re¬ 
sponsible in England for many artificialities, including especially 
spelling pronunciations. It may be described briefly as the influ¬ 
ence of a class but lately risen in the social scale and hence a bit 
unsure of itself—a class intensely eager to avoid giving away its 
vulgar origin by its speech habits. The great historical changes 

19 American English, p. 33. 

u London, 1920, p. 18 ff. 




THE STANDARD AMERICAN PRONUNCIATION 


217 


in Standard English, says Wyld, were synchronous with the appear¬ 
ance of new ‘‘classes of the population in positions of prominence 
and power in the state, and the consequent reduction in the influ¬ 
ence of the older governing classes.” He lists some of the events 
that produced such shifts in the balance of power: “the break-up 
of the feudal system; the extinction of most of the ancient baronial 
families in the War of the Roses; the disendowment of the mon¬ 
asteries, and the enriehing of the king’s tools and agents; the rise 
of the great merchants in the towns; the Parliamentary wars and 
the social upheaval of the Protectorate; the rise of banking during 
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.” These changes, he 
said, brought forward an authority which ranged itself against 
both “the mere frivolities of fashion, the careless and half-incoherent 
babble of the fop” and “the lumbering and uncouth utterance of 
the boor.” Precision in speech thus became the hall-mark of those 
who had but recently arrived. Obviously, the number of those who 
have but recently arrived has always been greater in the United 
States than in England, not only among the aristocracy of wealth 
and fashion but also among the intelligentsia. The average Ameri¬ 
can schoolmarm, the chief guardian of linguistic niceness in the 
Republic, does not come from the class that has a tradition of cul¬ 
ture behind it, but from the class of small farmers and city clerks 
and workmen. This is true, I believe, even of the average American 
college teacher. Such pedants advocate and practise precision be¬ 
cause it conceals their own cultural insecurity; if they are still 
oafs at heart they can nevertheless speak English in what they con¬ 
ceive to be the proper manner of professors, and so safeguard their 
dignity. From them come most of the gratuitous rules and regu¬ 
lations that afflict schoolboys and harass the writers of America. 
They are the chief discoverers and denouncers of “bad English” 
in the books of such men as Mark Twain, Dreiser and Hergesheimer. 

But in discussing such influences, of course, it is well to remember 
that they are very complex, and that one conceals and modifies 
another. “Man frage nicht warum,” says Philipp Karl Buttmann. 
“Der Sprachgebrauch lasst sich nur beobachten.” 12 Meanwhile, 
the greater distinctness of American utterance, whatever its genesis 
13 Lexilogus, 2nd ed.; Berlin, 1860, p. 239. 


218 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


and machinery, is palpable enough in many familiar situations. “The 
typical American accent,” says Vizetelly, “is often harsh and un¬ 
musical, but it sounds all of the letters to be sounded, and slurs, 
but does not distort, the rest.” 13 An American, for example, almost 
always sounds the first l in fulfill; an Englishman makes the first 
syllable foo. An American sounds every syllable in extraordinary, 
literary, military, dysentery, temporary, necessarily, secretary and 
the other words of the -ary-group; 14 an Englishman never pro¬ 
nounces the a of the penultimate syllable. Kindness, with the d 
silent, would attract notice in most parts of the United States; 
in England, according to Jones, 15 the d is “very commonly, if 
not usually” omitted. Often, in America, not infrequently retains 
a full t; in England it is actually and officially offen. Try an 
Englishman and an American with any word ending in -ing, say 
sporting or ripping. The latter will pronounce the final g; the 
former will usually omit it. Or with any word having r before 
a consonant, say card, harbor, lord or preferred. “The majority 
of Englishmen,” says Menner, “certainly do not pronounce the 
r . . . ; just as certainly the majority of educated Americans 
pronounce it distinctly.” 16 Henry James, visiting the United 
States after many years of residence in England, was much 
harassed by this persistent r-sound, which seemed to him to 
resemble “a sort of morose grinding of the back teeth.” 17 So 
sensitive to it did he become that he began to hear it where 
it was actually non-existent, save as an occasional barbarism, 
for example, in Cuba-r, vanilla-r and California-r. He put 
the blame for it, and for various other departures from the strict 

13 A Desk-Book of 25,000 Words Frequently Mispronounced, p. xvi. 

14 With the exception of cemetery; here the careful pronunciation of the last 
two syllables is a vulgarism. Cf. also the -oly and -ory groups, e. g., melancholy 
and laboratory. 

16 The Pronunciation of English, p. 17. 

10 The Pronunciation of English in America, op. cit., p. 362. See also On 
English Homophones, by Robert Bridges; Oxford, 1919, and Peetickay, by 
Wilfrid Perrett; Cambridge, 1920, p. 64 ff. Bridges’ word-lists show how far 
the elision of the r has gone in England. He gives the following, for example, 
as homophones; alms-arms, aunt-aren’t, balm-barm, board-bored-bawd, hoar- 
whore-haw,. lorn-lawn, pore-paw, source-sauce, saw-soar-sore, stalk-stork, taut- 
taught-tort, father-farther, ah-are, ayah-ire, bah-bar-baa, taw-tore, raw-roar, 
more-maw, floor-flaw. 

17 The Question of Our Speech, p. 29 ff. 


THE STANDARD AMERICAN PRONUNCIATION 


219 


canon of contemporary English, upon “the American school, the 
American newspaper, and the American Dutchman and Dago.” 
Unluckily for his case, the full sounding of the r came into American 
long before the appearance of any of these influences. The early 
colonists, in fact, brought it with them from England, and it still pre¬ 
vailed there in Dr. Johnson’s day, for he protested publicly against 
the “rough snarling sound” and gave all the aid he could to the 
natural phonetic process which finally resulted in its extinction. 18 
Today, extinct, it is mourned by English purists, and the Poet 
Laureate denounces the clergy of the Established Church for say¬ 
ing “the sawed of the Laud” instead of “the sword of the Lord.” 19 

But even in the matter of elided consonants American is not always 
the conservator. We cling to the r, we are relatively careful about 
the final g, we give nephew (following a spelling pronunciation, 
historically incorrect) a clear /-sound instead of the clouded 
English -y-sound, and we boldly nationalize trait and pronounce its 
final t, but we drop the second p from pumpkin and change the m 
to n, we change the ph (=/) sound to plain p in diphtheria, diph¬ 
thong and naphtha, 20 we relieve rind of its final d, we begin to 
neglect the d in landlady, handsome, grandmother, etc., and, in 
the complete sentence, we slaughter consonants by assimilation. I 
have heard Englishmen say brand-new, but on American lips it 
is almost invariably bran-new. So nearly universal is this nasali¬ 
zation in the United States that certain American lexicographers 
have sought to found the term upon bran and not upon brand. Here 
the national speech is powerfully influenced by Southern dialectal 
variations, which in turn probably derive partly from the linguistic 
limitations of the negro. The latter, even after two hundred years, 
has great difficulties with our consonants, and often drops them. A 
familiar anecdote well illustrates his speech habit. On a train stop¬ 
ping at a small station in Georgia a darkey threw up a window and 
yelled “Wah ee ?” The reply from a black on the platform was “Wah 

18 Cf. The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xiv, p. 487. 

19 Robert Bridges: A Tract on the Present State of English Pronunciation; 
Oxford, 1913. 

10 An interesting discussion of this peculiarity is in Some Variant Pronuncia¬ 
tions in the New South, by William A. Read, Dialect Notes, vol. iii, pt. vii, 1911, 
p. 504 ff. 


220 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


oo ?” A Northerner aboard the train, puzzled by this inarticulate dia¬ 
logue, sought light from a Southern passenger, who promptly trans¬ 
lated the first question as “Where is he ?” and the second as “Where 
is who ?” A recent viewer with alarm 21 argues that this conspiracy 
against the consonants is spreading, and that English printed words 
no longer represent the actual sounds of the American language. 
“Like the French/’ he says, “we have a marked liaison —the bor¬ 
rowing of a letter from the preceding word. We invite one another 
to cmeer (= come here). . . . Hoo-zat? (= who is that?) has as 
good a liaison as the French vons avez.” This critic believes that 
American tends to abandon t for d, as in Sadd’y (= Saturday ) 22 and 
siddup {— sit up), and to get rid of h, as in ware-zee? (= where is 
he?). But here we invade the vulgar speech, which belongs to 
Chapter IX. Even, however, in the standard speech there is a 
great slaughter of vowels. A correspondent of education, accustomed 
to observing accurately, sends me the following specimens of his own 
everyday conversation: 

We mus’n’ b’lieve all th’ts said. 

Wh’n y’ go t’ gi’ ch’ hat, please bring m’ mine. 

Le’s go. 

Would’n’ stay if ’ could. 

Keep on writin’ t’ll y’ c’n do ’t right. 

But here, of course, we come upon the tendency to depress all 
vowels to the level of a neutral e —a tendency quite as visible in 
English as in American, though there are differences in detail. The 
two languages, however, seem to develop along paths that tend 
to diverge more and more, and the divergences already 
in effect, though they may seem slight separately, are already of 
enough importance in the aggregate to put serious impediments 
between mutual comprehension. Let an Englishman and an Am er- 

21 Hughes Mearns: Our Own, Our Native Speech, McClure’s Magazine, Oct., 
1916. 

“A philological correspondent writes: “Here the t, in intervocalic position 
(as in icater, xoaiter) loses its aspiration and the energy of its articulation is 
greatly diminished, giving what phoneticians call a lenis. It remains a kind 
of t, however, in spite of this weakening. We don’t pronounce waiter and 
wader exactly alike. The weak t is not confined to vulgar speech, but is 
general in America. It is, I think, the most important single difference in 
articulation between British and American English.’’ 


THE STANDARD AMERICAN PRONUNCIATION 


221 


ican (not of New England) speak a quite ordinary sentence, “My 
aunt can’t answer for my dancing the lancers even passably,” and 
at once the gap separating the two pronunciations will be manifest. 
Add a dozen everyday words— military, schedule, trait, hostile, been, 
lieutenant, patent, laboratory, nephew, secretary, advertisement, and 
so on—and the strangeness of one to the other is augmented. “Every 
Englishman visiting the States for the first time,” said an English 
dramatist some time ago, “has a difficulty in making himself under¬ 
stood. He often has to repeat a remark or a request two or three 
times to make his meaning clear, especially on railroads, in hotels 
and at bars. The American visiting England for the first time has 
the same trouble.” 23 Despite the fact that American actors always 
imitate English pronunciation to the best of their skill, this visiting 
Englishman asserted that the average American audience is incapable 
of understanding a genuinely English company, at least “when the 
speeches are rattled off in conversational style.” When he pre¬ 
sented one of his own plays with an English company, he said, many 
American acquaintances, after witnessing the performance, asked 
him to lend them the manuscript, “that they might visit it again 
with some understanding of the dialogue.” 24 American speech is 
just as difficult for Englishmen. 


2 . 

The Vowels 

In Chapters II and III, I have already discussed historically the 
pronunciation of a in the United States—not, I fear, to much effect, 
but at all events as illuminatingly as the meagre materials so far 
amassed permit. The best study of the pronunciation of the letter 
today is to be found in George Philip Krapp’s excellent book, “The 
Pronunciation of Standard English in America,” from which I have, 
already quoted several times. This work is the first adequate treatise 

28 B. MacDonald Hastings, New York Trib-ime, Jan. 19, 1913. 

84 Various minor differences between English and American pronunciation, 
not noted here, are discussed in British and American Pronunciation, by Louise 
Pound, School Review, vol. xxiii, No. 0, June, 1915. 


222 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


upon American phonology to be published, and shows very careful 
observation and much good sense. Unluckily, Krapp finds it ex¬ 
tremely difficult, like all other phonologists, to represent the sounds 
that he deals with by symbols. He uses, for example, exactly the 
same symbol to indicate the abound in cab and the a-sound in bad, 
though the fact that they differ must be obvious to everyone. 
In the same way he grows a bit vague when he tries to 
represent the compromise < 2 rseund which lies somewhere between 
the a of father and the a of bad. “It is heard . . . chiefly,” he says, 
“in somewhat conscious and academic speech,” as a compromise be¬ 
tween the former, “which is rejected as being too broad,” and the 
latter, “which is rejected as being too narrow or flat.” This com¬ 
promise a, he says, “is cultivated in words with a, sometimes au, 
before a voiceless continuant, or before a nasal followed by a voiceless 
stop or continuant, as in grass, half, laugh, path (also before a voiced 
continuant, as in paths, calves, halves, baths, when the voiced form 
is a variant, usually the plural, of a head form with a voiceless 
sound), aunt, branch, cant, dance, fancy, France, shan’t, etc.” 
Krapp says that this a-sound is commonly an affectation, save 
in New England, and, as we have seen, it originated as an 
affectation even there. The flat a, on the contrary, is “widely dis¬ 
tributed over the whole country,” and may be regarded as the normal 
American a. Krapp notes “the purist tendency to condemn [the 
flat a]” and goes on: 

The result has been to give to [the compromise a] extraordinary dictionary 
and academic prestige in the face of a strongly opposing popular usage. The 
reasons for this are several: first, that standard British speech and some forms 
of New England speech have [a broad a] in the words in question; second, that 
New England has exerted, and to some extent continues to exert, a strong influ¬ 
ence upon formal instruction and upon notions of cultivation and refinement 
throughout the country; and third, that [the flat a] is often prolonged, or 
drawled, and nasalized in a way that makes it seem not merely American, but 
provincially American. To steer between the Scylla of provincialism and the 
Charybdis of affectation and snobbishness, many conscientious speakers in 
America cultivate [the compromise a]. The writer has tested this sound on 
many different groups of speakers from various sections of the country, and has 
never found one who used the sound who did not do so with a certain degree 
of self-consciousness. If the cult of this sound continues long enough, it may 
in time come to be a natural and established sound in the language. In the 
meantime, it seems a pity that so much effort and so much time in instruction 


THE STANDARD AMERICAN PRONUNCIATION 


223 


should be given to changing a natural habit of speech which is inherently just 
as good as the one by which the purist would supplant it. Especially in public 
school instruction it would seem to be wiser to spend time on more important 
matters in speech than the difference between half and haalf , 25 

Meanwhile, “the dictionary and academic prestige” of the broad a, 
whatever its precise form, has established it pretty generally in the 
United States in certain words which formerly had the flat a. Those 
in which it is followed by Im offer examples: psalm, palm, balm and 
calm. They were once pronounced to rhyme with ram and jam, but 
their pronunciation that way has begun to seem provincial and 
ignorant. Krapp says that the a has likewise broadened in alms, 
salmon and almond, but it is my own observation that this is not 
yet generally true. The first syllable of salmon, true enough, does 
not quite rhyme with bam, but it is nevertheless still very far from 
bomb. The broad a, by a fashionable affectation, has also got into 
vase, drama, amen and tomato —in the last case probably helped by 
the example of Southern speech, in which a few words, notably 
master, tomato and tassel, have shown the broad a for many years. 
Its intrusion into tomato has been vigorously denounced by an Eng¬ 
lishman, Evacustes A. Phipson. “It is really distressing,” he says, 
“to a cultivated Briton visiting America to find people there who . . . 
follow what they suppose to be the latest London mannerism, regard¬ 
less of accuracy. Thus we find one literary editress advocating the 
pedantic British pronunciation tomahto in lieu of the good English 
tomato, rhyming with potato, saying it sounds so much more ‘refined.’ 
I do not know whether she would be of the same opinion if she heard 
one of our costermongers bawling out: ‘ ’Ere’s yer foine termarters, 
lydy, hownly tuppence a pahnd.’ Similarly, we sometimes hear 
Anglomaniac Americans saying vaJiz for vase. Why not also bahz, 
and cahz ?” 26 The introduction of the broad a into drama is a 
pure affectation, and first showed itself, I believe, at the begin¬ 
ning of the heavily self-conscious movement which culminated 
in the organization of the Drama League of America, a society 
largely composed of college professors and social pushers. Amen, 
with the broad a, is now almost universal, save in the rural dis¬ 
tricts. E. W. Howe tells a story of a little girl in Kansas whose 

35 The Pronunciation of Standard English in America, p. 64. 

M Nation, Aug. 30, 1919, p. 290. 


224 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


mother, on acquiring social aspirations, entered the Protestant 
Episcopal Church from the Methodist Church. The father remain¬ 
ing behind, the little girl had to learn to say amen with the flat a 
when she went to church with her father and amen with the broad 
a when she went to church with her mother. 27 In Canada, despite 
the social influence of English usage, the flat a has conquered, and 
along the Canadian-New England border it is actually regarded as 
a Canadianism, especially in such words as calm and aunt. The 
broad a, when heard at all, is an affectation, and, as in Boston, 
is sometimes introduced into words, e. g., amass , which actually have 
the flat a in England. 

A broad a, though somewhat shorter than the a of father (a corre¬ 
spondent compares it aptly to the a in the German mann ) is very 
widely substituted, in the United States, for the o in such words as 
got, hot, rob, nobby, prophet, stock and chocolate. The same corre¬ 
spondent suggests that it shows itself clearly in the sentence: “On 
top of the log sat a large frog.” To his English ears, this sentence, 
from American lips, sounds like “Ann tahp uv thu laug sat a lahrge 
fraug.” The same a is also occasionally heard in dog, doll, horrid, 
hog, orange, coffee and God, though it has a rival in the tm-sound of 
audience. 28 Here, as Krapp observes, there is a considerable varia¬ 
tion in usage, even in the same speaker. The man who uses the first 
a in God may use the ctu-sound in dog. I believe that the former is 
generally looked upon as more formal. I have often noticed that a 
speaker who puts the cm-sound into God in his ordinary profane 
discourse, will switch to the purer a-sound when he wants to show 
reverence. The broad a in father seems to have very little influence 
upon cognate words. Save in New England one never hears it in 

27 The Rev. W. G. Polack, of Evansville, Ind., who has made a valuable inquiry 
into ecclesiastical terminology in America, tells me that among the Lutherans 
of the Middle West, amen has the flat a when spoken and the broad a when sung. 
So with the first syllable of hallelujah, though the last a is always broad. 

28 Krapp says (The Pronunciation of Standard English in America, p. 82) 
that he also hears this a-sound in project, process, produce and provost, but it is 
my observation that they are nearly always given a true o-sound. Prohduce is 
surely commoner than prahduce, and prohject is commoner than praveject. But 
problem, prospect, proverb, product and progress undoubtedly have the a-sound 
of father. Henry James denounces gated, dawg, sawft, laveft, gaione, latest and 
fratest as a “flat-drawling group” in The Question of Our Speech, p. 30, but, 
as usual, he is somewhat extravagant. 



THE STANDARD AMERICAN PRONUNCIATION 


225 


gather, lather and blather, and even there it is often abandoned for 
the flat a by speakers who are very careful to avoid the latter in 
'palm, dance and aunt. Krapp says that the broad a is used in “some 
words of foreign origin,” notably lava, data, errata, bas-relief, spa, 
mirage and garage. This is certainly not true of the first three, 
all of which, save exceptionally, have the flat a. Garage, at one time, 
threatened to acquire the flat a, too, and so became a rhyme for 
carriage, but I believe that a more correct pronunciation is prevail¬ 
ing. In a number of other classes of words the pronunciation of the 
a varies. In patriot and its derivatives, for example, the a is some¬ 
times that of hat and sometimes that of late. In radish the a is 
sometimes that of cab and sometimes a sort of e, hard to distinguish 
from that of red. In such proper names as Alabama, Montana, 
Nevada and Colorado the flat a is commonly heard (especially in 
the states themselves), but a broad a is not unknown. The usual 
pronunciation of again and against gives them a second a indis¬ 
tinguishable from the e of hen, but the influence of the schoolmarm 
has launched a pronunciation employing the a of lane. 

The other vowels present fewer variations from standard English. 
A spelling pronunciation often appears in pretty, making the first 
syllable rhyme with set; it always rhymes with sit in standard 
English. The use of the long e in deaf, though ardently advocated 
by Noah Webster, has almost disappeared from cultivated speech; 
it persists, however, in the vulgate, and is noted in Chapter IX. 
In the same way the t-sound, as in sit, has disappeared from get, yet, 
chest and instead; even the vulgate is losing it. So, again, the old 
ai-sound, as in laid, has vanished from egg, peg, leg and their 
cognates, though here the vulgate preserves it. As Krapp shows, 
the neutral e, toward which all our vowels seem to be tending, 29 
shows signs of itself disappearing. This is particularly noticeable, 
in American, in such words as moral, quarrel and real, which be- 

29 This tendency is not confined to English. The same neutral e is encountered 
in languages as widely differing otherwise as Arabic, French and Swedish. “Its 
existence,” says Sayce, in The Science of Language, vol. i, p. 259, “is a sign of 
age and decay; meaning has become more important than outward form, and 
the educated intelligence no longer demands a clear pronunciation in order to 
understand what is said.” Here, of course, decay means what the old-time 
philologists called phonetic decay; the word has no reference to the general 
vigor of the language. 


226 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


come mor’l, quar’l and re’l, each a single syllable. In the vulgar 
speech this neutral e is also dropped from other words, notably 'poem, 
diary, violet and diamond, which become pome, di’ry, vilet and 
di’mond. Even in the standard speech it grows shadowy in the 
second syllable of fertile, hostile, servile, fragile, agile, reptile, etc. 
In standard English these words are pronounced with the second 
syllable clearly rhyming with vile. The long e-sound in creek is 
maintained in standard American, but changed to the short f-sound 
of sit in the vulgate. Sleek has divided into two words, slick and 
sleek, the former signifying cunning and ingratiating and the latter 
referring especially to appearance. Of late there has been a strong 
tendency to abandon the old e-sound in such terms as bronchitis and 
appendicitis for an ai-sound, as in pie and buy; this is a senseless 
affectation, but it seems to be making progress. A contrary move¬ 
ment to abandon the old oi-sound in iodine, quinine, etc., for an 
e-sound, as in sleep, has better support in etymology, but is appar¬ 
ently less popular. Chlorine is always pronounced with the e-sound, 
but iodine continues to be iodyne, and kin-een for quinine still sounds 
strange. In two other familiar words the ai-sound has been sup¬ 
planted in American: in sliver by the short i of liver, and in farina 
by an e-sound. Both have the ew*-sound in standard English. Been, 
in America, almost always is bin; bean never appears save as a 
conscious affectation. But in England bean is invariably heard, and 
in a recent poem an English poet makes it rhyme with submarine, 
queen and unseen. 30 

I have already mentioned the displacement of o by ah or au in 
such words as dog and God. “Whenever the o-sound is fully stressed 
and long, and especially when it is final, it tends,” says Krapp, “to 
become diphthongal, starting with o and closing with [the] u [of 
bush ], as in dough, doe, toe, tow, flow, floe, chateau, etc.” 31 But in 
British speech a greater variety of diphthongal shadings occur, “some 
of them familiar in the exaggerated representations of Englishmen 
and their speech on the American stage. In the speech of many, 
perhaps of most, Americans there is scarcely any trace of diphthongal 
quality in the sound.” Usage in the pronunciation of u still differs 

30 Open Boats, by Alfred Noyes; New York, 1917, pp. 89-91. 

“The Pronunciation of Standard English in America, p. SI ff. 


THE STANDARD AMERICAN PRONUNCIATION 


227 


widely in the United States. The two sounds, that of oo in goose and 
that of u in bush, are used by different speakers in the same word. 
The oo-sound prevails in aloof, boot, broom, food, groom, proof, roof, 
rood, room, rooster, root, soon, spook, spoon and woof, and the resound 
in butcher, cooper, hoof, hoop, nook, rook and soot, hut there are 
educated Americans who employ the oo-sound in coop, hoof and 
hoop. In hooves I have heard both sounds, but in rooves only the 
oo-sound. Rooves seems to be extinct in the written speech as the 
plural of roof, but it certainly survives in spoken American. In 
words of the squirrel, syrup and stirrup class Americans commonly 
substitute a w.-sound for the e-sound used by Englishmen, and squirrel 
becomes a monosyllable, squr’l. In words of the com class, save com¬ 
pany, Americans substitute a broad a for the u used by Englishmen; 
even compass often shows it. The English are far more careful 
with the shadowy y preceding u in words of the duty class than 
Americans. The latter retain it following m, f, v and p, and usually 
before r, but they are careless about it following n and g, and drop 
it following l, r, d, t, th and s. Nyew, nyude, dyuke, enthyusiasm 
and syuit would seem affectations in most parts of the United 
States. 32 Schoolmasters still battle valiantly for dyuty, but in vain. 
In 1912 the Department of Education of Hew York City warned 
all the municipal high-school teachers to combat the oo-sound 33 but 
it is doubtful that one pupil in a hundred was thereby induced to 
insert the y in induced. In figure, however, Americans retain 
the y-sound, whereas the English drop it. In clerk, as everyone 
knows, the English retain the old a-sound, which is historically 
correct, and make the word rhyme with lark; in the United States 
it rhymes with lurk. Finally, there is lieutenant. The Englishman 
pronounces the first syllable lef; the American invariably makes it 
loo. White says that the prevailing American pronunciation is 
relatively recent. “I never heard it,” he reports, “in my boy¬ 
hood.” 34 He was born in New York in 1821. 

32 A woman teacher of English, horn in Tennessee, tells me that the y-sound is 
much more persistent in the South than in the North. “I have never,” she says, 
“heard a native Southerner fail to retain the sound in new. The same is true of 
duke, stew, due, duty and Tuesday. But it is not true of Hue and true.” 

33 High School Circular No. 17, June 19, 1912. 

34 Every-Day English, p. 243. 


VIII 


AMERICAN SPELLING 

1 . 

The Two Orthographies 

The chief changes made in the standard English spelling in the 
United States may be classified as follows: 

1. The omission of the penultimate u in toords ending in -our: 


American 

English 

arbor 

arbour 

armor 

armour 

behavior 

behaviour 

candor 

candour 

clamor 

clamour 

clangor 

clangour 

color 

colour 

demeanor 

demeanour 

endeavor 

endeavour 

favor 

favour 

fervor 

fervour 

flavor 

flavour 

glamor 

glamour 

harbor 

harbour 

honor 

honour 

humor 

humour 

labor 

labour 

neighbor 

neighbour 

odor 

odour 

parlor 

parlour 

rancor 

rancour 

rigor 

rigour 

rumor 

rumour 

savor 

savour 

splendor 

splendour 

succor 

succour 

tumor 

tumour 

valor 

valour 

vapor 

vapour 

vigor 

vigour 


228 


AMERICAN SPELLING 


229 


2. The reduction of duplicate consonants to single consonants 


3. 


American 

English 

councilor 

councillor 

counselor 

counsellor 

fagot 

faggot 

jewelry 

jewellery 

net (adj.) 

nett 

traveler 

traveller 

wagon 

waggon 

woolen 

woollen 

n of a redundant e: 

annex (noun) 

annexe 

asphalt 

asphalte 

ax 

axe 

form (printer’s) 

forme 

good-by 

good-bye 

intern (noun) 

interne 

story (of a house) 

storey 

of terminal -re into -er: 

caliber 

calibre 

center 

centre 

fiber 

fibre 

liter 

litre 

meter 

metre 

saltpeter 

saltpetre 

theater 

theatre 


5. The omission o; unaccented foreign terminations: 


6 . 


catalog 

catalogue 

envelop 1 

envelope 

epaulet 

epaulette 

gram 

gramme 

program 

programme 

prolog 

prologue 

toilet 

toilette 

veranda 

verandah 

n of u when combined with a 

or o: 

balk (verb) 

baulk 

font (printer’s) 

fount 

gantlet (to run the —) 

gauntlet 

mold 

mould 

molt 

moult 

mustache 

moustache 

stanch 

staunch 


1 The English dictionaries make a distinction between the verb, to envelop, 
and the noun, envelope. This distinction seems to be disappearing in the United 
States. 


230 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


The conversion of smoothed diphthongs into simple vowels: 

American 

English 

anemia 

anaemia 

anesthetic 

anaesthetic 

encyclopedia 

encyclopaedia 

diarrhea 

diarrhoea 

ecology 

cecology 

ecumenical 

oecumenical 

edema 

oedema 

eon 

aeon 

esophagus 

oesophagus 

esthetic 

aesthetic 

estival 

aestival 

etiology 

aetiology 

hemorrhage 

haemorrhage 

medieval 

mediaeval 

septicemia 

septicaemia 

The change of compound consonants into simple consonants 

bark (ship) 

barque 

burden (ship’s) 

burthen 

check (bank) 

cheque 

draft (ship’s) 

draught 

picket (military) 

piquet 

plow 

plough 

stenosis 

stegnosis 

vial 

phial 

The change of o into a or u: 

naught 

nought 

pudgy 

podgy 

slug (verb) 

slog 

slush 

slosh 

taffy 

toffy (or toffee) 

The change of e into i: 

gasoline 

gasolene 

inclose 

enclose 

indorse 

endorse 

inquire 

enquire 

jimmy (burglar’s) 

jemmy 

scimitar 2 

scimetar 

The use of y instead of a, ia or i: 

ataxia 

ataxy 

baritone 

barytone 

cachexia 

cachexy 

cider 

cyder 


2 The Manchester Guardian protests that it always spells the word scimitar. 
Nevertheless, the Concise Oxford Dictionary gives scimetar. 


AMERICAN SPELLING 


231 



pajamas 

pyjamas 


siphon 

syphon 3 4 


tire (noun) 

tyre 

12. 

The change of c into s: 



American 

English 


defense 

defence 


offense 

offence 


pretense 

pretence 


vise (atool) 

vice 

13. 

The substitution of s for z: 



fuse 

fuze 

14. 

The substitution of k for c: 



mollusk 

mollusc 


skeptic 

sceptic 

15. 

The insertion of a supernumerary e: 



forego 

forgo 


foregather 

forgather 

16. 

The substitution of ct for x: 



connection 

connexion 


inflection 

inflexion 

17. 

The substitution of y for i: 



dryly 

drily 


gayety 

gaiety 


gypsy 

gipsy 


pygmy 

pigmy 

18. 

Miscellaneous differences: 



alarm (signal) 

alarum 


behoove 

behove 


brier 

briar 


buncombe 

bunkum 


catsup 

ketchup 


cloture 

closure 


cozy 

cosy 


cutlas 

cutlass 


czar 

tsar 


gray 

grey 


hostler 

ostler 


jail 

gaol 


maneuver 

manoeuvre 


pedler 

pedlar 


show (verb) 

shew 


snicker 

snigger 


3 1 have omitted siren, which followed in my earlier editions. The word was 
spelled syren in England until a few years ago, but now the American spelling 
has prevailed, as it has begun to prevail in the case of soimitar. 

4 This word, it will be observed, belongs to both Class 4 and Class 7, above. 


232 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


This list might be very much extended by including compounds 
and derivatives, e. g., coloured, colourist, colourless, colour-blind, 
colour-line, colour-sergeant, colourable, colourably, neighbourhood, 
neighbourly, neighbourliness, favourite, favourable, slogger, kilo¬ 
gramme, kilometre, amphitheatre, centremost, baulky, anaesthesia, 
plough-boy, dreadnought, enclosure, endorsement, and by including 
forms that are going out of use in England, e. g., fluxation 5 
for fluctuation, surprize for surprise, and forms that are still but half 
established in the United States, e. g., chlorid, brush, cigaret, lac¬ 
rimal, rime, gage, quartet, eolian, dialog, lodgment, niter, sulfite, 
phenix . 6 According to a recent writer upon the subject, “there are 
812 words in which the prevailing American spelling differs from 
the English.” 7 But enough examples are given here to reveal a 
number of definite tendencies. American, in general, moves toward 
simplified forms of spelling more rapidly than English, and has got 
much further along the road. Redundant and unnecessary letters 
have been dropped from whole groups of words, simple vowels have 
been substituted, for degenerated diphthongs, simple consonants have 
displaced compound ones, and vowels have been changed to bring 
words into harmony with their analogues, as in tire, cider and bari¬ 
tone ( cf. wire, rider, merriment). Clarity and simplicity are served 
by substituting ct for x in such words as connection and inflection, 
and s for c in words of the defense group. The superiority of jail 
to gaol is made manifest by the common mispronunciation of the 
latter by Americans who find it in print, making it rhyme with coal. 
The substitution of i for e in such words as indorse, inclose and 
jimmy is of less patent utility. Of more obscure origin is what 
seems to be a tendency to avoid the o-sound, so that the English slog 
becomes slug, podgy becomes pudgy, slosh becomes slush, toffee be¬ 
comes taffy, and so on. Other changes carry their own justification. 
Hostler is obviously better American than ostler, though it may be 

6 1 find “-fluxation of the rate of exchange” in the New Witness, Feb. 4, 1921. 
Cassell marks it obsolete; the Concise Oxford gives only fluctuation. 

6 This form is used by the Chatham and Phenix National Bank, in New York. 
But the Phoenix Insurance Company, of Hartford, Conn., retains the old 
spelling. About 100 corporations having the word in their names are listed 
in the New York telephone directory. A fifth of them use phenix. 

’Richard P. Read: The American Language, New York Sun, March 7, 1918. 


AMERICAN SPELLING 


233 


worse English. Show is more logical than shew . 8 Cozy is more 
nearly phonetic than cosy. Curb has analogues in curtain, curdle, 
curfew, curl, currant, curry, curve, curtsey, curse, currency, cursory, 
curtain, cur, curt and many other common words: herb has very few, 
and of them only kerchief and kernel are in general use. Moreover, 
the English themselves use curb as a verb and in all noun senses save 
that shown in kerbstone. Such forms as monolog and dialog still 
otfend the fastidious, but their merit is not to be gainsaid. Nor 
would it be easy to argue logically against gram, toilet, mustache, 
anesthetic, draft and tire. 

But a number of anomalies remain. The American substitution 
of a for e in gray is not easily explained, nor is the retention of e in 
forego, nor the unphonetic substitution of s for z in fuse, nor the 
persistence of the y in gypsy and pygmy, nor the occasional survival 
of a foreign form, as in cloture . 9 Here we have plain vagaries, sur¬ 
viving in spite of attack by orthographers. Webster, in one of his 
earlier books, denounced the k in skeptic as a “mere pedantry,” but 
later on he adopted it. In the same way pygmy, gray and mollusk 
have been attacked, hut they still remain sound American. Tho 
English themselves have many more such illogical forms to account 
for. They have to write offensive and defensive, despite their fidelity 
to the c in offence and defence. They have begun to drop the 
duplicate consonant from riveter, leveled and biased, despite their 
use of traveller and jewellery . 10 They cling to programme, but never 
think of using diagramme or telegramme. Worst of all, they are 
wholly inconsistent in their use of the -our ending, the chief hallmark 
of orthodox English orthography. In American the u appears only 
in Saviour and then only when the word is used in the biblical sense. 
In England it is used in most words of that class, but omitted from a 

8 To shew has completely disappeared from American, but it still survies in 
English usage. Cf. The Sheunng-lJp of Blanco Posnet, by George Bernard Shaw.. 
The word, of course, is pronounced show, not shoe. Shrew, a cognate word, still 
retains the early pronunciation of shrow on the English stage, though not in 
common usage. It is now phonetic in American. 

0 Fowler and Fowler, in The King’s English, p. 23, say that “when it was pro¬ 
posed to borrow from France what we [t. e., the English] now know as the 
closure, it seemed certain for some time that with the thing we should borrow 
the name, cldture; a press campaign resulted in closure.” But in the Congres¬ 
sional Record it is still cloture, though with the loss of the circumflex accent, 
and this form is generally retained by American newspapers. 

10 See the preface to the Concise Oxiord Dictionary, p. vi. 



234 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


very respectable minority, e. g., horror, torpor, amoassador. It is 
commonly argued in defense of it over there that it serves to dis¬ 
tinguish French loan-words from words derived directly from the 
Latin, but Tucker shows 11 that this argument is quite nonsensical, 
even assuming that the distinction has any practical utility. Am¬ 
bassador, ancestor, bachelor, editor, emperor, error, exterior, gover¬ 
nor, inferior, metaphor, mirror, progenitor, senator, superior, suc¬ 
cessor and torpor all came into English from the French, and yet 
British usage sanctions spelling them without the u. On the other 
hand it is used in arbour, behaviour, clangour, flavour and neighbour, 
“which are not French at all.” Tucker goes on: 

Even in ardour, armour, candour, endeavour, favour, honour, labour, odour, 
parlour, rigour, rumour, saviour, splendour, tumour and vapour, where the u 
has some color of right to appear, it is doubtful whether its insertion has much 
value as suggesting French derivation, for in the case of twelve of these words 
the ordinary reader would be quite certain to have in mind only the modern 
spelling— ardeur, armure, oandeur, faveur, honneur, labour, odeur, riguewr, 
rumeur, splendeur, tumeur and vapeur —which have the u indeed but no o (and 
why should not one of these letters be dropped as well as the other?)—while 
endeavour, parlour and saviour come from old French words that are themselves 
without the u — devoir, parleor and saveor. The u in all these words is there¬ 
fore either useless or positively misleading. And finally in the case of colour, 
clamour, fervour, humour, rancour, valour and vigour, it is to be remarked that 
the exact American orthography actually occurs in old French! “Finally,” 
I said, but that is not quite the end of British absurdity with these -our -or 
words. Insistent as our transatlantic cousins are on writing arbour, armour, 
clamour, clangour, colour, dolour, flavour, honour, humour, labour, odour, ran¬ 
cour, rigour, savour, valour, vapour and vigour, and “most unpleasant” as they 
find the omission of the excrescent u in any of these words, they nevertheless 
make no scruple of writing the derivatives in the American way— arboreal, 
armory, clamorous, clangorous, colorific, dolorous, fiavorous, honorary, humorous, 
laborious, odorous, rancorous, rigorous, savory, valorous, vaporize and vigorous 
—not inserting the u in the second syllable of any one of these words. The 
British practice is, in short and to speak plainly, a jumble of confusion, without 
rhyme or reason, logic or consistency; and if anybody finds the American simplifi¬ 
cation of the whole matter “unpleasant,” it can be only because he is a victim 
of unreasoning prejudice against which no argument can avail. 

If the u were dropped in all derivatives, the confusion would be 
less, blit it is retained in many of them, for example, colourable, 
favourite, misdemeanour, coloured and labourer. The derivatives of 

11 American English; New York, 1921, p. 37, 



AMERICAN SPELLING 


235 


honour exhibit clearly the difficulties of the American who essays 
to write correct English. Honorary, honorarium and honorific drop 
the u, but honourable retains it! Furthermore, the English make a 
distinction between two senses of rigor. When used in its patholog¬ 
ical sense (not only in the Latin form of rigor mortis, hut as an 
English word) it drops the uj in all other senses it retains the u. 


2 . 

The Influence of Webster 

At the time of the first settlement of America the rules of English 
orthography were beautifully vague, and so we find the early docu¬ 
ments full of spellings that seem quite fantastic today. Aetaernall 
(for eternal) is in the Acts of the Massachusetts General Court for 
1646. But now and then a curious foreshadowing of later American 
usage is encountered. On July 4, 1631, for example, John Winthrop 
wrote in his journal that “the governour built a bark at Mistick 
which was launched this day.” During the eighteenth century, how¬ 
ever, and especially after the publication of Johnson’s dictionary, 
there was a general movement in England toward a more inflexible 
orthography, and many hard and fast rules, still surviving, were 
then laid down. It was Johnson himself who established the position 
of the u in the -our words. Bailey, Dyche and other lexicographers 
before him were divided and uncertain; Johnson declared for the u, 
and though his reasons were very shaky 12 and he often neglected 
his own precept, his authority was sufficient to set up a usage which 
still defies attack in England. Even in America this usage was not 
often brought into question until the last quarter of the eighteenth 
century. True enough, honor appears in the Declaration of Inde¬ 
pendence, but it seems to have got there rather by accident than by 
design. In Jefferson’s original draft it is spelled honour. So early 

12 Cf. Lounsbury: English Spelling and Spelling Reform; p. 209 et seq. John¬ 
son even advocated trwnslatour, emperour, oratour and horrour. But, like most 
other lexicographers, he was often inconsistent, and the conflict between interiour 
and exterior, and anteriour and posterior, in his dictionary, laid him open to 
much criticism. 


236 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


as 1768 Benjamin Franklin had published his “Scheme for a New 
Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling, with Remarks and 
Examples Concerning the Same, and an Enquiry into its Uses'’ and 
induced a Philadelphia typefounder to cut type for it, but this scheme 
was too extravagant to.be adopted anywhere, or to have any ap¬ 
preciable influence upon spelling. 13 

It was Noah Webster who finally achieved the divorce between 
English example and American practise. He struck the first blow in 
his “Grammatical Institute of the English Language,” published at 
Hartford in 1783. Attached to this work was an appendix bearing 
the formidable title of “An Essay on the Necessity, Advantages and 
Practicability of Reforming the Mode of Spelling, and of Rendering 
the Orthography of Words Correspondent to the Pronunciation,” and 
during the same year, at Boston, he set forth his ideas a second 
time in the first edition of his “American Spelling Book.” The in¬ 
fluence of this spelling-book was immediate and profound. It took 
the place in the schools of Dilworth’s “Aby-sel-pha,” the favorite of 
the generation preceding, and maintained its authority for fully a 
century. Until Lyman Cobb entered the lists with his “New Spelling 
Book,” in 1842, its innumerable editions scarcely had any rivalry, 
and even then it held its own. I have a New York edition, dated 
1848, which contains an advertisement stating that the annual sale 
at that time was more than a million copies, and that more than 
30,000,000 copies had been sold since 1783. In the late 40’s the 
publishers, George F. Cooledge & Bro., devoted the whole capacity 
of the fastest steam press in the United States to the printing of it. 
This press turned out 525 copies an hour, or 5,250 a day. It was 
“constructed expressly for printing Webster’s Elementary Spelling 
Book [the name had been changed in 1829] at an expense of $5,000.” 
Down to 1889, 62,000,000 copies of the book had been sold. 

The appearance of Webster’s first dictionary, in 1806, greatly 
strengthened his influence. The best dictionary available to Ameri¬ 
cans before this was Johnson’s in its various incarnations, but against 
Johnson’s stood a good deal of animosity to its compiler, whose im¬ 
placable hatred of all things American was well known to the citizens 

“In a letter to Miss Stephenson, Sept. 20, 1768, he exhibited the use of his 
new alphabet. The letter is to be found in most editions of his writings. 


AMERICAN SPELLING 


237 


of the new republic. John Walker’s dictionary, issued in London 
in 1791, was also in use, but not extensively. 14 A home-made school 
dictionary, issued at New Haven in 1798 or 1799 hy one Samuel 
Johnson, Jr.—apparently no relative of the great Sam—and a 
larger work published a year later by Johnson and the Rev. John 
Elliott, pastor in East Guilford, Conn., seem to have made no 
impression, despite the fact that the latter was commended by Simeon 
Baldwin, Chauncey Goodrich and other magnificoes of the time and 
place, and even by Webster himself. The field was thus open to 
the laborious and truculent Noah. He was already the acknowledged 
magister of lexicography in America, and there was an active public 
demand for a dictionary that should be wholly American. The ap¬ 
pearance of his first duodecimo, according to Williams, 15 thereby 
took on something of the character of a national event. It was 
received, not critically, but patriotically, and its imperfections were 
swallowed as eagerly as its merits. Later on Webster had to meet 
formidable critics, at home as well as abroad, but for nearly a 
quarter of a century he reigned almost unchallenged. Edition after 
edition of his dictionary was published, each new one showing ad¬ 
ditions and improvements. Finally, in 1828, he printed his great 
“American Dictionary of the English Language,” in two large octavo 
volumes. It held the field for half a century, not only against 
Worcester and the other American lexicographers who followed 
him, but also against the best dictionaries produced in England. 
Until the appearance of the Concise Oxford in 1914, indeed, America 
remained far ahead of England in practical dictionary making. 

Webster had declared boldly for simpler spellings in his early 
spelling books; in his dictionary of 1806 he made an assault at all 
arms upon some of the dearest prejudices of English lexicographers. 
Grounding his wholesale reforms upon a saying by Franklin, that 

“There were, of course, other dictionaries. Bailey’s Universal Etymological 
English Dictionary, first published in 1721, was known to some of the early 
Americans, and so, according to a correspondent, was Boyer’s Royal Dictionary. 
In 1777 Perry’s Royal Standard English Dictionary was published at Boston, 
and in 1788 the famous printer, Isaiah Thomas, reissued it in a so-called 
American edition, with a declaration that it was “the first work of the kind 
printed in America.” But Johnson’s dictionary oershadowed all of these. 

15 R. 0. Williams: Our Dictionaries; New York, 1890, p. 30. See also S. A. 
Steger: American Dictionaries; Baltimore, 1913. 



238 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


“those people spell best who do not know how to spell”— i. e., who 
spell phonetically and logically—he made an almost complete sweep 
of whole classes of silent letters—the u in the -our words, the final e 
in determine and requisite, the silent a in thread, feather and steady, 
the silent b in thumb, the s in island, the o in leopard, and the redun¬ 
dant consonants in traveler, wagon, jeweler, etc. (English: traveller, 
waggon, jeweller). More, he lopped the final k from frolick, physick 
and their analogues. Yet more, he transposed the e and the r in 
many words ending in re, such as theatre, lustre, centre and calibre. 
Yet more, he changed the c in all words of the defence class to s. 
Yet more, he changed ph to / in words of the phantom class, ou to oo 
in words of the group class, ow to ou in crowd, porpoise to porpess, 
acre to aker, sew to soe, woe to wo, soot to sut, gaol to jail, and plough 
to plow. Einally, he antedated the simplified spellers by inventing 
a long list of boldly phonetic spellings, ranging from tung for tongue 
to wimmen for women, and from hainous for heinous to cag for keg. 

A good many of these new spellings, of course, were not actually 
Webster’s inventions. For example, the change from -our to -or in 
words of the honor class was a mere echo of an earlier English un¬ 
certainty. In the first three folios of Shakespeare, 1623, 1632 and 
1663-6, honor and honour were used indiscriminately and in almost 
equal proportions; English spelling was still fluid, and the -owr-form 
was not consistently adopted until the fourth folio of 1685. Morer 
over, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, is authority for the 
statement that the -or-form was “a fashionable impropriety” in Eng¬ 
land in 1791. But the great authority of Johnson stood against it, 
and Webster was surely not one to imitate fashionable improprieties. 
He deleted the u for purely etymological reasons, going hack to the 
Latin honor, favor and odor without taking account of the inter¬ 
mediate French honneur, faveur and odeur. And where no etymo¬ 
logical reasons presented themselves, he made his changes by analogy 
and for the sake of uniformity, or for euphony or simplicity, or 
because it pleased him, one guesses, to stir up the academic animals. 
Webster, in fact, delighted in controversy, and was anything but 
free from the national yearning to make a sensation. 

A great many of his innovations, of course, failed to take root, 
and in the course of time he abandoned some of them himself. In 


AMERICAN SPELLING 


239 


his early “Essay on the Necessity, Advantage and Practicability of 
Reforming the Mode of Spelling” he advocated reforms which were 
already discarded by the time he published the first edition of his 
dictionary. Among them were the dropping of the silent letter in 
such words as head, give, built and realm, making them hed, giv, hilt, 
and relm; the substitution of doubled vowels for apparent diphthongs 
in such words as mean, zeal and near, making them meen, zeel and 
neer; and the substitution of sh for ch in such French loan-words as 
machine and chevalier, making them masheen and shevaleer. He 
also declared for stile in place of style, and for many other such 
changes, and then quietly abandoned them. The successive editions 
of his dictionary show still further concessions. Croud, fether, 
groop, gillotin, Hand, insted, leperd, soe, sut, steddy, thret, thred, 
thurn and wimmen appear only in the 1806 edition. In 1828 he 
went back to crowd, feather, group, island, instead, leopard, sew, 
soot, steady, thread, threat, thumb and women, and changed gillotin 
to guillotin. In addition, he restored the final e in determine, dis¬ 
cipline, requisite, imagine, etc. In 1838, revising his dictionary, 
he abandoned a good many spellings that had appeared in either 
the 1806 or the 1828 edition, notably maiz for maize, suveran,™ for 
sovereign and guillotin for guillotine. But he stuck manfully to a 
number that were quite as revolutionary—for example, aker for 
acre, cag for keg, grotesk for grotesque, hainous for heinous, porpess 
for porpoise and tung for tongue —and they did not begin to dis¬ 
appear until the edition of 1854, issued by other hands and eleven 
years after his death. Three of his favorites, chimist for chemist, 
neger for negro and zeber for zebra, are incidentally interesting as 
showing changes in American pronunciation. He abandoned zeber 
in 1828, but remained faithful to chimist and neger to the last. 

But though he was thus forced to give occasional ground, and in 
more than one case held out in vain, Webster lived to see the majority 
of his reforms adopted by his countrymen. He left the ending in -or 
triumphant over the ending in -our, he shook the security of the 
ending in -re, he rid American spelling of a great many doubled 

18 1 find soveran in the London Times Literary Supplement for Aug. 5, 1920, 
p. 1, art. Words for Music, but it seems to have no support elsewhere. Cassell 
and the Concise Oxford do not list it. 


240 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


consonants, he established the s in words of the defense group, and 
he gave currency to many characteristic American spellings, notably 
jail, wagon, plow, mold and ax. These spellings still survive, and 
are practically universal in the United States today; their use con¬ 
stitutes one of the most obvious differences between written English 
and written American. Moreover, they have founded a general 
tendency, the effects of which reach far beyond the field actually 
traversed by Webster himself. New words, and particularly loan¬ 
words, are simplified, and hence naturalized in American much more 
quickly than in English. Employe has long since become employee 
in our newspapers, and asphalte has lost its final e, and manoeuvre 
has become maneuver, and pyjamas has become pajamas. Even the 
terminology of science is simplified and Americanized. In medicine, 
for example, the highest American usage countenances many forms 
which would seem barbarisms to an English medical man if he 
encountered them in the Lancet. In derivatives of the Greek haima 
it is the almost invariable American custom to spell the root syllable 
hem, but the more conservative English make it hcem — e. g., in 
haemorrhage and haemophilia. In an exhaustive list of diseases 
issued by the United States Public Health Service 17 the haem- form 
does not appear once. In the same way American usage prefers 
esophagus, diarrhea and gonorrhea to the English oesophagus, diar¬ 
rhoea and gonorrhoea. In the style book of the Joumal of the Amer¬ 
ican Medical Association I find many other spellings that would 
shock an English medical author, among them curet for curette, co - 
cain for cocaine, gage for gauge, intern for interne, lacrimal for lach¬ 
rymal, and a whole group of words ending in -er instead of in -re. 18 

Webster’s reforms, it goes without saying, have not passed un¬ 
challenged by the guardians of tradition. A glance at the literature 
of the first years of the nineteenth century shows that most of the 
serious authors of the time ignored his new spellings, though they 


37 Nomenclature of Diseases and Conditions, prepared by direction of the Sur¬ 
geon General; Washington, 1916. 

18 American Medical Association Style Book; Chicago, 1915. At the 1921 session 
of the American Medical Association in Boston an English gynecologist read a 
paper and it was printed in the Journal. When he received the proofs he ob¬ 
jected to a great many of the spellings, e. g., gonorrheal for gonorrhoeal, and 
fallopian for Falloppian. The Journal refused to agree to his English spellings, 
but when his paper was reprinted separately they were restored. 


AMERICAN SPELLING 


241 


were quickly adopted by the newspapers. Bancroft’s “Life of Wash¬ 
ington” contains -our endings in all such words as honor, ardor and 
favor. Washington Irving also threw his influence against the -or 
ending, and so did Bryant and most of the other literary big-wigs 
of that day. After the appearance of “An American Dictionary of 
the English Language,” in 1828, a formal battle was joined, with 
Lyman Cobb and Joseph E. Worcester as the chief opponents of 
the reformer. Cobb and Worcester, in the end, accepted the -or 
ending and so surrendered on the main issue, but various other 
champions arose to carry on the war. Edward S. Gould, in a 
once famous essay, 19 denounced the whole Websterian orthography 
with the utmost fury, and Bryant, reprinting this philippic in the 
Evening Post, said that on account of Webster “the English language 
has been undergoing a process of corruption for the last quarter of a 
century,” and offered to contribute to a fund to have Gould’s de¬ 
nunciation “read twice a year in every school-house in the United 
States, until every trace of Websterian spelling disappears from the 
land.” But Bryant was forced to admit that, even in 1856, the chief 
novelties of the Connecticut schoolmaster “who taught millions to 
read but not one to sin” were “adopted and propagated by the largest 
publishing house, through the columns of the most widely circulated 
monthly magazine, and through one of the ablest and most widely 
circulated newspapers in the United States”—which is to say, the 
Tribune under Greeley. The last academic attack was delivered by 
Bishop Coxe in 1886, and he contented himself with the resigned 
statement that “Webster has corrupted our spelling sadly.” Louns- 
bury, with his active interest in spelling reform, ranged himself 
on the side of Webster, and effectively disposed of the controversy 
by showing that the great majority of his spellings were supported 
by precedents quite as respectable as those behind the fashionable 
English spellings. In Lounsbury’s opinion, a good deal of the oppo¬ 
sition to them was no more than a symptom of antipathy to all 
things American among certain Englishmen and of subservience to 
all things English among certain Americans. 20 

19 Demooratio Review, March, 1856. 

*° Vide English Spelling and Spelling Reform, p. 229. 


242 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


Webster’s inconsistencies gave bis opponents a formidable weapon 
for use against him—until it began to be noticed that the orthodox 
English spelling was quite as inconsistent. He sought to change acre 
to aker, but left lucre unchanged. He removed the final / from 
bailiff, mastiff, plaintiff and pontiff, but left it in distaff. He 
changed c to s in words of the offense class, but left the c in fence. 
He changed the ck in frolick, physick, etc., into a simple c, but 
restored it in such derivatives as frolicksome. He deleted the silent 
u in mould, but left it in court. These slips were made the most of 
by Cobb in a furious pamphlet in excessively fine print, printed in 
1831. 21 He also detected Webster in the frequent faux pas of using 
spellings in his definitions and explanations that conflicted with 
the spellings he advocated. Various other purists joined in the 
attack, and it was renewed with great fury after the appearance of 
Worcester’s dictionary, in 1846. Worcester, who had begun his 
lexicographical labors by editing Johnson’s dictionary, was a good 
deal more conservative than Webster, and so the partisans of con¬ 
formity rallied around him, and for a while the controversy took 
on all the rancor of a personal quarrel. Even the editions of Webster 
printed after his death, though they gave way on many points, were 
violently arraigned. Gould, in 1867, belabored the editions of 1854 
and 1866 22 and complained that “for the past twenty-five years the 
Websterian replies have uniformly been bitter in tone, and very 
free in the imputation of personal motives, or interested or improper 
motives, on the part of opposing critics.” At this time Webster him¬ 
self had been dead for twenty-two years. Scheie de Vere, during 
the same year, denounced the publishers of the Webster dictionaries 
for applying “immense capital and a large stock of energy and 
perseverance” to the propagation of his “new and arbitrarily imposed 
orthography.” 23 

21 A Critical Review of the Orthography of Dr. Webster’s Series of Books . . . ; 
New York, 1831. 

22 Good English; p. 137 et seq. 

23 Studies in English; pp. 64-5. 


AMERICAN SPELLING 


243 


3. 

The Advance of American Spelling 

The logical superiority of American spelling is well exhibited by 
its persistent advance in the face of all this hostility at home and 
abroad. The English objection to our simplifications, as Brander 
Matthews once pointed out, is not wholly or even chiefly etymolog¬ 
ical; its roots lie, to borrow James Russell Lowell’s phrase, in an 
esthetic hatred burning “with as fierce a flame as ever did theological, 
hatred.” There is something inordinately offensive to English purists 
in the very thought of taking lessons from this side of the water, 
particularly in the mother-tongue. The opposition, transcending the 
academic, takes on the character of the patriotic. “Any American,” 
said Matthews in 1892, “who chances to note the force and the fervor 
and the frequency of the objurgations against American spelling in 
the columns of the Saturday Review, for example, and of the 
Athenaeum, may find himself wondering as to the date of the papal 
bull which declared the infallibility of contemporary British orthog¬ 
raphy, and as to the place where the council of the Church was held 
at which it was made an article of faith.” 24 But that, as I say, was 
in 1892. Since then there has been an enormous change, and though 
the editors of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, so recently as 1914, 
pointedly refrained from listing forms that would “strike every 
reader as Americanisms,” they surrendered in a wholesale manner 
to forms quite as thoroughly American in origin, among them, ax, 
alarm, tire, asphalt, program, toilet, balk, wagon, vial, inquire, 
pygmy and czar. The monumental Rew English Dictionary 
upon which the Concise Oxford is based shows many silent 
concessions, and quite as many open yieldings—for example, 
in the case of ax, which is admitted to be “better than axe 
on every ground.” Moreover, practical English lexicographers tend 
to march ahead of it, outstripping the liberalism of its editor, Sir 
James A. H. Murray. In 1914, for example, Sir James was still 
protesting against dropping the first e from judgement, a characteris- 

Americanisms and Briticisms; New York, 1892, p. 37. 


244 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


tic Americanism, but during the same year the Concise Oxford put 
judgment ahead of judgement, and two years earlier the Authors’ 
and Printers’ Dictionary, edited by Horace Hart , 25 had dropped 
judgement altogether. Hart is Controller of the Oxford University 
Press, and the Authors’ and Printers’ Dictionary is an authority 
accepted by nearly all of the great English book publishers and 
newspapers. Its last edition shows a great many American spellings. 
For example, it recommends the use of jail and jailer in place of the 
English gaol and gaoler, says that ax is better than axe, drops the 
final e from asphalte and forme, changes the y to i in cyder, cypher 
and syren and advocates the same change in tyre , drops the redundant 
t from nett , changes burthen to burden, spells wagon with one g, pre¬ 
fers fuse to fuze, and takes the e out of storey. “Rules for Com¬ 
positors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford,” also edited 
by Hart (with the advice of Sir James Murray and Dr. Henry 
Bradley), is another very influential English authority . 26 It gives 
its imprimatur to bark (a ship), cipher, siren, jail, story, tire and 
wagon, and even advocates kilogram and omelet. Cassell’s Hew 
English Dictionary 27 goes quite as far. Like Hart and the Oxford 
it clings to the -our and -re endings and to the diphthongs in such 
words as aesthete and ancesthesia, but it prefers jail to gaol, net to 
nett, story to storey, asphalt to asphalte, tire to tyre, wagon to 
waggon, inquiry to enquiry, vial to phial, baritone to barytone, and 
pygmy to pigmy. 

There is, however, much confusion among these authorities; the 
English are still unable to agree as to which American spellings they 
will adopt and which they will keep under the ban for a while longer. 
The Concise Oxford prefers bark to barque and the Poet Laureate 28 
adopts it boldly, but Cassell still clings to barque. Cassell favors 
baritone ; the Oxford declares for barytone. The Oxford is for czar; 
Cassell is for tsar. The Oxford admits program; Cassell sticks to 

25 Authors’ & Printers’ Dictionary ... an attempt to codify the best typo¬ 
graphical practices of the present day, by F. Howard Collins; 4th ed., revised 
by Horace Hart; London, 1912. 

2,1 Horace Hart: Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, 
Oxford: 23rd ed.; London, 1914. I am informed by Mr. Humphrey Davy, of the 
London Times, that, with one or two minor exceptions, the Times i observes the 
rules laid down in this book. 

22 Edited by Dr. Ernest A. Baker; London, 1919. 

“English Homophones; Oxford, 1919, p. 7. 


AMERICAN SPELLING 


245 


programme. Cassell adopts the American scimitar; the Oxford 
retains the English scimetar. Both have abandoned enquire for 
inquire, but they remain faithful to encumbrance, endorse and 
enclose, though they list indorsation and the Oxford also gives in¬ 
dorsee. Hart agrees with them. 29 Both have abandoned cether for 
ether, but they cling to aesthetic and aetiology. Neither gives up 
plough, cheque, connexion, mould, mollusc or herb, and Cassell even 
adorns the last-named with an astounding compound credited to 
“American slang," to wit, herb-stone broker. Both favor such forms 
as surprise and advertisement, and yet I find surprized, advertize- 
ment and to advertize in the prospectus of English, a magazine 
founded to further “the romantic and patriotic study of English,” 
and advertize and advertizing are in the first number. 30 All the 
English authorities that I have consulted prefer the -re 31 and -our 
endings; nevertheless the London Nation adopted the -or ending 
in 1919, 32 and George Bernard Shaw had adopted it years before, 
as had Walter Savage Landor before him. The British Board of 
Trade, in attempting to fix the spelling of various scientific terms, 
has often come to grief. Thus it detaches the final -me from gramme 
in such compounds as kilogram and milligram, but insists upon 
gramme when the word stands alone. In American usage gram is 
now common, and scarcely challenged. A number of spellings, nearly 
all American, are trembling on the brink of acceptance in both coun¬ 
tries. Am ong them is rime (for rhyme). This spelling was correct 
in England until about 1530, but its recent revival was of American 
origin. It is accepted by the Concise Oxford and by the editors of 
the Cambridge History of English Literature, but not by Cassell. It 
seldom appears in an English journal. 33 The same may be said of 
grewsome. It has got a footing in both countries, but the weight of 

"Even worse inconsistencies are often encountered. Thus enquiry appears on 
p. 3 of the Dardanelles Commission’s First Report; London, 1917; but in 
quiring is on p. 1. 

30 London, March, 1919. 

81 Caliber is now the official spelling of the United States Army. Cf. Descrip¬ 
tion and Rules for the Management of the U. S. Rifle, Caliber .30, Model of 1903; 
Washington, 1915. But calibre is still official in England. 

° Cf. English, May-June, 1919, p. 88. 

33 It should be added, however, that Notes and Queries has used rime for many 
years. 


246 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


English opinion is still against it. Develop (instead of develope ) 
has gone further in both countries. So has engulf, for engulph. 


4. 

British Spelling in the United States 

American imitation of English orthography has two impulses 
behind it. First, there is the colonial spirit, the desire to pass as 
English—in brief, mere affectation. Secondly, there is the wish 
among printers, chiefly of books, to reach a compromise spelling 
acceptable in both countries, thus avoiding expensive revisions in 
case sheets are printed for publication in England. 34 The first 
influence need not detain us. It is chiefly visible among folk of 
fashionable pretensions, and is not widespread. At Bar Harbor, in 
Maine, some of the summer residents are at great pains to put 
harbour instead of harbor on their stationery, but the local post¬ 
master still continues to stamp all mail Bar Harbor, the legal name 
of the place. In the same way American haberdashers sometimes 
advertise pyjamas instead of pajamas, just as they advertise braces 
instead of suspenders and boots instead of shoes. But this benign 
folly does not go very far. Beyond occasionally clinging to the -re 
ending in words of the theatre group, all American newspapers and 
magazines employ the native orthography, and it would be quite as 
startling to encounter honour or traveller in one of them as it would 
be to encounter gaol or waggon. Even the most fashionable jewelers 
in Fifth avenue still deal in jewelry, not in jewellery. 

The second influence is of more effect and importance. In the 
days before the copyright treaty between England and the United 

84 Mere stupid copying may perhaps be added. An example of it appears on a 
map printed with a pamphlet entitled Conquest and Kultur, compiled by two 
college professors and issued by the Creel press bureau during the Great War. 
(Washington, 1918.) On this map, borrowed from an English periodical called 
New Europe without correction, annex is spelled annexe. In the same way 
English spellings often appear in paragraphs reprinted from the English news¬ 
papers. As compensation in the case of annexe I find annex on pages 11 and 23 
of A Report on the Treatment by the Enemy of British Prisoners of War Behind 
the Firing Lines in France and Belgium; Miscellaneous No. 7 (1918). When 
used as a verb the English always spell the word annex. Annexe is only the 
noun form. 



AMERICAN SPELLING 


247 


States, one of the standing arguments against it among the English 
was based upon the fear that it would flood England with books set 
up in America, and so work a corruption of English spelling. 35 
This fear, as we have seen, had a certain plausibility; there is not 
the slightest doubt that American books and American magazines 
have done valiant missionary service for American orthography. 
But English conservatism still holds out stoutly enough to force 
American printers to certain compromises. When a book is designed 
for circulation in both countries it is common for the publisher to 
instruct the printer to employ “English spelling.” This English 
spelling, at the Riverside Press, 36 embraces all the -our endings and 
the following further forms: 


cheque 

grey 

chequered 

inflexion 

connexion 

jewellery 

dreamt 

leapt 

faggot 

premiss (in logic) 

forgather 

waggon 

forgo 



It will be noted that gaol, tyre, storey, kerb, asphalte, armexe, 
ostler, mollusc and pyjamas are not listed, nor are the words ending 
in -re. These and their like constitute the English contribution to 
the compromise. Two other great American book presses, that of 
the Macmillan Company and that of the J. S. Cushing Company, 37 
add gaol and storey to the list, and also behove, briar, drily, en¬ 
quire, gaiety, gipsy, instal, judgement, lacquey, moustache, nought, 
pygmy, postillion, reflexion, shily, slily, staunch and verandah. 
Here they go too far, for, as we have seen, the English themselves 
have begun to abandon enquire and judgement, and lacquey is also 
going out over there. Moreover, all the new English dictionaries 
prefer shyly and slyly to shily and slily. The Riverside Press, even 
in books intended only for America, prefers certain English 
forms, among them, ancemia, axe, mediaeval, mould, plough, 

iS Yide Matthews: Americanisms and Briticisms, pp. 33-34. 

38 Handbook of Style in Use at the Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass.; Boston, 
1913. 

37 Notes for the Guidance of Authors; New York, 1918; Preparation of Manu¬ 
script, Proof Reading, and Office Style at J. S. Cushing Company’s; Norwood, 
Mass., n. d. 


248 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


programme and quartette, but in compensation it stands by 
such typical Americanisms as caliber, calk, center, cozy, 
defense, foregather, gray, hemorrhage, luster, maneuver, mus¬ 
tache, theater and woolen. The Government Printing Office 
at Washington follows Webster’s New International Dic¬ 
tionary, 38 which supports many of the innovations of Webster 
himself. This dictionary is the authority in perhaps a majority 
of American printing offices, with the Standard and the Century 
supporting it. The latter two also follow Webster, notably in his -er 
endings and in his substitution of s for c in words of the defense 
class. The Worcester Dictionary is the sole exponent of English 
spelling in general circulation in th.e United States. It remains 
faithful to most of the -re endings, and to manoeuvre, gramme, 
plough, sceptic, woollen, axe and many other English forms. But 
even Worcester favors such characteristic American spellings as 
behoove, brier, caliber, checkered, dryly, jail and wagon. The At¬ 
lantic Monthly, which is inclined to be stiff and British, follows 
Webster, but with certain reservations. Thus it uses the -re ending 
in words of the center class, retains the u in mould, moult and mous¬ 
tache, retains the redundant terminal letters in such words as 
gramme, programme and quartette, retains the final e in axe and 
adze, and clings to the double vowels in such words as mediaeval, 
anaesthesia, homoeopathy, and diarrhoea*. In addition, it uses the 
English plough, whiskey, clue and gruesome, differentiates between 
the noun practice and the verb to practise, and makes separate words 
of to ensure, to make certain, and to insure, to protect or indemnify. 
It also prefers entnist to intrust. It follows the somewhat arbitrary 
rule laid down by Webster for the doubling of consonants in deriva¬ 
tives bearing such suffixes as -ed, -ing, -er, and -ous. This rule is that 
words ending in l, p, r and t, when this last letter is preceded by a 
vowel, double the consonant before such suffixes, but only if the 
words are monosyllables or polysyllables accented on the last syl¬ 
lable. Thus dispelled has two Z’s, but traveled has one, equipped 

38 Style Book, a Compilation of Rules Governing Executive, Congressional and 
Departmental Printing, Including the Congressional Record, ed. of Feb., 1917; 
Washington, 1917. A copy of this style book is in the proof-room of nearly every 
American daily newspaper and its rules are generally observed. 



AMERICAN SPELLING 


249 


has two p’s but worshiper one, occurred has two Fs but altered one, 
and petted has two t’s but trumpeter one. 39 

There remains a twilight zone in which usage is still uncertain 
in both England and America. The words in it are chiefly neologisms, 
e. g., airplane. In 1914 or thereabout the London Times announced 
that it had decided to use airplane in place of aeroplane, but three 
weeks later it went back to the original form. The Concise Oxford 
sticks to aeroplane (without the dieresis) and so does Cassell’s, though 
it lists airplane among war terms. The majority of English news¬ 
papers follow these authorities, (but in the United States airplane is 
in steadily increasing use. Some confusion is caused by the fact that 
the French, who originated practically all of our aeronautical terms, 
use aeroplane, but omit the final e from biplan, monoplan, etc. A 
correspondent calls my attention to the fact that the two terminations 
are not the same etymologically. The plan of biplan is a word mean¬ 
ing “a plane, a plane surface”; while the plane of aeroplane is a for¬ 
mation taken from the verb planer, to soar, to glide. Hence aero¬ 
plane means a ce qui plane dans l’air,” while biplan means “ce qui 
a deux plans.” In the United States the current forms are biplane 
and monoplane. 

In Canada the two orthographies, English and American, flourish 
side by side. By an Order-in-Council of 1890, all official correspond¬ 
ence must show the English spelling, but practically all of the news¬ 
papers use the American spelling and it is also taught in most of 
the public schools, which are under the jurisdiction, not of the Domin¬ 
ion government, but of the provincial ministers of education. In 
Australia the English spelling is official, but various American forms 
are making fast progress. According to the Triad, the leading Aus¬ 
tralian magazine, 40 “horrible American inaccuracies of spelling are 
coming into common use” in the newspapers out there; worse, the 
educational authorities of Victoria authorize the use of the American 
-er ending. This last infamy has been roundly denounced by Sir 
Adrian Knox, Chief Justice of the Commonwealth, and the Triad 
displays a good deal of colonial passion in supporting him. “Unhap- 

89 Text, Type and Style, a Compendium of Atlantic Usage, by George B. Ives; 

Boston, 1921, p. 186^. 

40 May 10, 1921, p. 5. 



250 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


pily,” it says, “we have no English Academy to guard the purity and 
integrity of the language. Everything is left to the sense and loyalty 
of decently cultivated people.” But even the Triad admits that 
American usage, in some instances, is “correct.” It is, however, bel¬ 
ligerently faithful to the -oitr-ending. “If it is correct or tolerable 
in English,” it argues somewhat lamely, “to write labor for labour, 
why not boddy for body, steddy for steady, and yot for yachtf” 
Meanwhile, as in Canada, the daily papers slide into the Yankee 
orbit. 


5. 


Simplified Spelling 

The current movement toward a general reform of Fnglish-Ameri¬ 
can spelling is of American origin, and its chief supporters are Ameri¬ 
cans today. Its actual father was Webster, for it was the long contro¬ 
versy over his simplified spellings that brought the dons of the Ameri¬ 
can Philological Association to a serious investigation of the subject. 
In 1875 they appointed a committee to inquire into the possibility 
of reform, and in 1876 this committee reported favorably. During 
the same year there was an International Convention for the Amend¬ 
ment of English Orthography at Philadelphia, with several delegates 
from England present, and out of it grew the Spelling Reform Asso¬ 
ciation. 41 In 1878 a committee of American philologists began pre¬ 
paring a list of proposed new spellings, and two years later the Philo¬ 
logical Society of England joined in the work. In 1883 a joint mani¬ 
festo was issued, recommending various general simplifications. 
Among those enlisted in the movement were Charles Darwin, Lord 

41 Accounts of earlier proposals of reform in English, spelling are to be found 
in Sayce’s Introduction to the Science of Language, vol. i, p. 330 et seq., and 
White’s Everyday English, p. 152 et seq. The best general treatment of the 
subject is in Lounsbury’s English Spelling and Spelling Reform; New York, 
1909. A radical innovation, involving the complete abandonment of the present 
alphabet and the substitution of a series of symbols with vowel points, is pro¬ 
posed in Peetickay, by Wilfrid Perrett; Cambridge (England), 1920. Mr. 
Perrett’s book is written in a lively style, and includes much curious matter. 
He criticises the current schemes of spelling reform very acutely. Nearly all of 
them, he says, suffer from the defect of seeking to represent all the sounds of 
English by the present alphabet. This he calls “one more reshuffle of a prehis¬ 
toric pack, one more attempt to deal out 26 cards to some 40 players.” 




AMERICAN SPELLING 


251 


Tennyson, Sir John Lubbock and Sir J. A. H. Murray. In 1886 
the American Philological Association issued independently a list 
of recommendations affecting about 3,500 words, and falling under 
ten headings. Practically all of the changes proposed had been put 
forward 80 years before by Webster, and some of them had entered 
into unquestioned American usage in the meantime, e. g., the deletion 
of the u from the -our words, the substitution of er for re at the end 
of words, and the reduction of traveller to traveler. 

The trouble with the others was that they were either too uncouth 
to be adopted without a long struggle or likely to cause errors in pro¬ 
nunciation. To the first class belonged tung for tongue, ruf for 
rough, batl for battle and abuv for above, and to the second such 
forms as each for catch and troble for trouble. The result was that 
the whole reform received a set-back: the public dismissed the re¬ 
formers as a pack of dreamers. Twelve years later the National Edu¬ 
cation Association revived the movement with a proposal that a be¬ 
ginning be made with a very short list of reformed spellings, and 
nominated the following by way of experiment: tho, altho, thru, 
thruout, thoro, thoroly, thorofare, program, prolog, catalog, pedagog 
and decalog. This scheme of gradual changes was sound in prin¬ 
ciple, and in a short time at least two of the recommended spellings, 
program and catalog, were in general use. Then, in 1906, came the 
organization of the Simplified Spelling Board, with an endowment 
of $15,000 a year from Andrew Carnegie, and a formidable list of 
members and collaborators, including Henry Bradley, F. I. Fumi- 
vall, C. H. Grandgent, W. W. Skeat, T. R. Lounsbury and F. A. 
March. The board at once issued a list of 300 revised spellings, new 
and old, and in August, 1906, President Roosevelt ordered their 
adoption by the Government Printing Office. But this unwise effort 
to hasten matters, combined with the buffoonery characteristically 
thrown about the matter by Roosevelt, served only to raise up ene¬ 
mies, and since then, though it has prudently gone back to more 
discreet endeavors and now lays main stress upon the original 12 
words of the National Education Association, the Board has not made 
a great deal of progress. 42 From time to time it issues impressive 

13 Its second list was published on January 28, 1908, its third on January 25, 
1909, and its fourth on March 24, 1913, and since then there have been several 



252 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


lists of newspapers and periodicals that are using some, at least, of 
its revised spellings and of colleges that have made them optional, 
but an inspection of these lists shows that very few publications of 
any importance have been converted and that most of the great uni¬ 
versities still hesitate. 43 It has, however, greatly reinforced the au¬ 
thority behind many of Webster’s spellings, and aided by the Chem¬ 
ical Section of the American Association for the Advancement of 
Science and the editors of the Joumal of the American Medical As¬ 
sociation, it has done much to reform scientific orthography. Such 
forms as gram, cocain, chlorid, anemia and anilin are the products 
of its influence. 44 Its latest list recommends the following changes: 

1. When a word begins with ce or ce substitute e: esthetic, medieval, subpena. 
But retain the diphthong at the end of a word: alumnee. 

2. W^hen bt is pronounced t, drop the silent b: det, dettor, dout. 

3. When ceed is final spell it cede: excede, procede, suocede. 

4. When ch is pronounced like hard c, drop the silent h except before e, i 
and y: caracter, clorid, ccrus, cronic, eco, epoc, mecanic, monarc, scolar, scool, 
stomac, tecnical. But retain architect, chemist, monarchy. 

5. When a double consonant appears before a final silent e drop the last two 
letters: bizar, cigaret, creton, gavot, gazet, giraf, gram, program, quartet, 
vaudevil. 

6. When a word ends with a double consonant substitute a single consonant: 
ad, bil, bluf,' buz, clas, dol, dul, eg, glas, les, los, mes, mis, pas, pres, shal, tel, 
toil. But retain ll after a long vowel: all, roll. And retain ss when the word 
has more than one syllable: needless. 

7. Drop the final silent e after a consonant preceded by a short stressed 
vowel: giv, hav, liv. 

8. Drop the final silent e in the common words are, gone and were: or, gon, 
toer. 

9. Drop the final silent e in the unstressed final short syllables ide, ile, me, 
ise, ite and ive: activ, bromid, definit, determin, practis, hostil. 

10. Drop the silent e after Iv and rv: involv, twelv, carv, deserv. 

others. But most of its literature is devoted to the 12 words and to certain 
reformed spellings of Webster, already in general use. 

43 In April, 1919, it claimed 556 newspapers and periodicals, with a circulation 
of 18,000,000, and 460 universities, colleges and normal schools. 

44 The Standard Dictionary, published in 1906, gave great aid to the movement 
by listing the 3,500 reformed spellings recommended by the American Philologi¬ 
cal Association in 1886. The publishers of the Standard are also the publishers 
of the Literary Digest, the only magazine of large circulation to adopt the 
Simplified Spelling Board’s recommendations to any appreciable extent. It sub¬ 
stitutes simple vowels for diphthongs in such words as esthetic and fetus, uses 
t in place of the usual terminal ed in addrest, affixt, etc., drops the final me 
and te in words of the programme and cigarette classes, and drops the ue from 
words of the catalogue class. See Funk & W 7 agnalls Company Style Card; New 
York, 1914. 


AMERICAN SPELLING 


253 


11. Drop the silent e after v or z when preceded by a digraph representing a 
long vowel or a diphthong: aohiev, freez, gauz, sneez. 

12. Drop the e in final oe when it is pronounced o: fo, ho, ro, to, wo. But 
retain it in inflections: foes, hoed. 

13. When one of the letters in ea is silent drop it: "bred, brekfast, hed, hart, 
harth. 

14. When final ed is pronounced d drop the e: cold, oarrid, employd, marrid, 
robd, sneezd, struggld, wrongd. But not when a wrong pronunciation will be 
suggested: bribd, cand, fild (for filed), etc. 

15. Wlien final ed is pronounced t substitute t: addrest, shipt, helpt, indorst. 
But not when a wrong pronunciation will be suggested: baJct, fact (for faced), 
etc. 

16. When ei is pronounced like ie in brief substitute ie: conciet, deciev, 
wierd. 

17. When a final ey is pronounced y drop the e: barly, chimny, donky, mony, 
vally. 

18. When final gh is pronounced f substitute f and drop the silent letter ol 
the preceding digraph: enuf, laf, ruf, tuf. 

19. When gh is pronounced g drop the silent h: agast, gastly, gost, goul. 

20. When gm is final drop the silent g: apothem, diagram, flem. 

21. When gue is final after a consonant, a short vowel or a digraph repre¬ 
senting a long vowel or a diphthong drop the silent ue: tung, catalog, harang, 
leag, sinagog. But not when a wrong pronunciation would be suggested: rog 
(for rogue), vag (for vague), etc. 

22. When a final ise is pronounced ize substitute ize: advertize, advize, 
franchize, rize, wize. 

23. W T hen mb is final after a short vowel drop b: bom, crum, dum, lam, lim, 
thum. But not when a wrong pronunciation would be suggested: com (for 
comb), tom (for tomb), etc. 

24. When ou before l is pronounced o drop u: mold, sholder. But not sol 
(for soul). 

25. When ough is final spell o, u, ock or up, according to the pronunciation: 
altho, boro, donut, furlo, tho, thoro, thru, hock, hiccup. 

26. When our is final and ou is pronounced as a short vowel drop u: color, 
honor, labor. 

27. When ph is pronounced f substitute f: alfabet, emfasis, fantom, fono- 
graf, fotograf, sulfur, telefone, telegraf. 

28. W 7 hen re is final after any consonant save c substitute er: center, fiber, 
meter, theater. But not lucer, mediocer. 

29. W T hen rh is initial and the h is silent drop it: retoric, reumatism, rime, 
rubarb, rithm. 

30. W 7 hen so is initial and the o is silent drop it: senery, sented, septer, 
sience, sissors. 

31. When u is silent before a vowel drop it: bild, condit,* garantee, gard, 
ges, gide, gild. 

32. When y is between consonants substitute i: analisis, fisio, gipsy, paralize, 
rime, silvan, tipe. 

«I have never heard the u dropped in conduit. But I quote the Simplified 
Spelling Board. 


254 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


Obviously this list is far ahead of the public inclination. More¬ 
over, it is so long and contains so many exceptions (observe rules 1, 
4, 6, 12, 14, 15, 21, 23, 24 and 28) that there is little hope that 
any considerable number of Americans will adopt it, at least during 
the lifetime of its proponents. Its extravagance, indeed, has had the 
effect of alienating the support of the National Education Associa¬ 
tion, and at the convention held in Des Moines in the Summer of 
1921 the Association formally withdrew from the campaign. 46 But 
even so long a list is not enough for the extremists. To it they add 
various miscellaneous new spellings: aker, anser, burlesk, buro, cam- 
pain, catar, counterfit, delite, foren, forfit, frend, grotesk, Hand, 
maskerade, morgage, picturesk, siv, sorgum, sovren, spritely, tuck, 
yu and yung. The reader will recognize some of these as surviving 
inventions of Webster. But though all such bizarre forms languish, 
the twelve spellings adopted by the National Education Association 
in 1898 are plainly making progress, especially tho and thru. I read 
many manuscripts by American authors, and find in them an increas¬ 
ing use of both forms, with the occasional addition of altho, thoro and 
thoroly. The spirit of American spelling is on their side. They 
promise to come in as honor, bark, check, wagon and story came in 
many years ago, as tire , 47 esophagus and theater came in later on, 
and as programcatalog and cyclopedia came in only yesterday. The 
advertisement writers seem to be even more hospitable than the 
authors. Such forms as vodvil, burlesk, foto, fonograf, kandy, kar, 
holsvm, kumfort, sulfur, arkade, kafeteria and segar are not infre¬ 
quent in their writings. At least one American professor of Eng¬ 
lish predicts that these forms will eventually prevail. Even fosfate 
and fotograf, he says, “are bound to be the spellings of the future.” 48 
Meanwhile the advertisement writers and authors combine in an 
attempt to naturalize alright, a compound of all and right, made by 
analogy with already and almost. I find it in American manu¬ 
scripts every day, and it not seldom gets into print. 49 So far no 

"See the Weekly Review, July 16, 1921, p. 47. 

47 Tyre was still in use in America in the 70’s. It will be found on p. 150 
of Mark Twain’s Roughing It: Hartford, 1872. 

"Krapp: Modern English, p. 181. 

49 For example, in Teepee Neighbors, by Grace Coolidge; Boston, 1917, p. 
220; Duty and Other Irish Comedies, by Seumas O’Brien; New York, 1916, 
p. 52; Salt, by Charles G. Norris; New York, 1918, p. 135, and The Ideal 


AMERICAN SPELLING 


255 


dictionary supports it, but it has already migrated to England and 
has the imprimatur of a noble lord. 50 Another vigorous newcomer 
is sox for socks. The White Sox are known to all Americans; the 
White Socks would seem strange. The new plural has got into the 
Congressional Record. 51 


6 . 

The Treatment of Loaru-Words 

In the treatment of loan-words English spelling is very much more 
conservative than American. This conservatism, in fact, is so 
marked that it is frequently denounced by English critics of the 
national speech usages, and it stood first among the “tendencies of 
modern taste” attacked by the Society for Pure English in its 
original prospectus in 1913—a prospectus prepared by Henry Brad¬ 
ley, Dr. Robert Bridges, Sir Walter Raleigh and L. Pearsall Smith, 62 
and signed by many important men of letters, including Thomas 
Hardy, A. J. Balfour, Edmund Gosse, Austin Dobson, Maurice 
Hewlett, Gilbert Murray, George Saintsbury and the professors of 
English literature at Cambridge and London, Sir Arthur Quiller- 
Couch and W. P. Ker. I quote from this caveat: 

Literary taste at the present time, with regard to foreign words recently 
borrowed from abroad, is on wrong lines, the notions which govern it being 
scientifically incorrect, tending to impair the national character of our standard 
speech, and to adapt it to the habits of classical scholars. On account of 
these alien associations our borrowed terms are now spelt and pronounced, not 
as English, but as foreign words, instead of being assimilated, as they were 
in the past, and brought into conformity with the main structure of our speech. 
And as we more and more rarely assimilate our borrowings, so even words 
that were once naturalized are being now one by one made un-English, and 
driven out of the language back into their foreign forms; whence it comes 
that a paragraph of serious English prose may be sometimes seen as freely 

Guest, by Wyndham Lewis, Little Review , May, 1918, p. 3. O’Brien is an 
Irishman and Lewis an Englishman, but the printer in each case was American. 
I find allright , as one word but with two Vs, in Diplomatic Correspondence 
with Belligerent Governments, etc., European War, No. 4; Washington, 1918, 
p. 214. 

60 Vide How to Lengthen Our Ears, by Viscount Harberton; London, 1917, 

p. 28. 

51 May 16, 1921, p. 1478, col. 2. 

“ Smith is an expatriate American, and extremely British in his point of view. 


256 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


sprinkled with italicized French words as a passage of Cicero is often inter¬ 
larded with Greek. The mere printing of such words in italics is an active 
force toward degeneration. The Society hopes to discredit this tendency, and 
it will endeavour to restore to English its old recreative energy; when a choice 
is possible we should wish to give an English pronunciation and spelling to 
useful foreign words, and we would attempt to restore to a good many words 
the old English forms which they once had, but which are now supplanted by 
the original foreign forms. “ 

A glance through any English weekly or review, or, indeed, any 
English newspaper of the slightest intellectual pretension will show 
how far this tendency has gone. All the foreign words that English 
must perforce employ for want of native terms of precisely the 
same import are carefully italicized and accented, e. g., matinee, 
cafe, crepe, debut, portiere, eclat, naivete, regime, role, soiree, 
precis, protege, elite, gemutlichkeit, melee, tete-a-tete, porte-cochere, 
divorcee, fiancee, weltpolitik, weltschmerz, muzhik, ukase, denoue¬ 
ment. Even good old English words have been displaced by foreign 
analogues thought to be more elegant, e. g., repertory by repertoire, 
sheik by shaikh, czar by tsar, levee by levee, moslem by muslim, 
khalifate by khilifat, said by seyd, crape by crepe, supper by souper. 
Legion of Honor by Legion d’honneur, gormand by gourmand, grip 
by la grippe, crown by krone. Proper names also yield to this new 
pedantry, and the London Times frequently delights the aluminados 
by suddenly making such substitutions as that of Serbia for Servia 
and that of Rumania for Roumania; in the course of time, if the 
warnings of the S. P. E. do not prevail, the English may be writing 
Munchen, Kfibenhavn, Napoli, Wien, Warszava, Bruxelles and 
s’ Gravenhage ; even today they commonly use Hannover, Habana and 
Leipzig. Nearly all the English papers are careful about the dia¬ 
critical marks in proper names, e. g., Sevres, Zurich, Bulow, Fran- 

53 S. P. E. Tract No. 1, Preliminary Announcement and List of Members, 
Oct., 1919; Oxford, 1919, p. 7. The Literary Supplement of the London Times 
supported the Society in a leading article on Jan. 8, 1920. “Of old,” it said, 
“we incorporated foreign words rapidly and altered their spelling ruthlessly. 
Today we take them in and go on spelling them and pronouncing them in a 
foreign way. Rendezvous is an example, regime is another. They have come 
to stay; the spelling of the first, and at least the pronunciation of the second, 
should be altered; and a powerful organization of schoolmasters and journalists 
could secure changes which the working classes are in process of securing with 
the words (more familiar to them) garridge and shover.” See also A Few 
Practical Suggestions, by Logan Pearsall Smith, S. P. E. Tract No. 3; Ox¬ 
ford, 1920, especially sections i, ii and iii. 



AMERICAN SPELLING 


257 


gois, Frederic, Heloise, Bogota, Orleans, Besangon, Rhone, Cote- 
d’Or, Wurttemberg. The English dictionaries seldom omit the ac¬ 
cents from recent foreign words. Cassell’s leaves them off regime 
and debut, but preserves them on practically all the other terms 
listed above; the Concise Oxford always uses them. 

In the United States, as everyone knows, there is no such pre¬ 
ciosity visible. Depot became depot immediately it entered the 
language, and the same rapid naturalization has overtaken employe, 
matinee, debutante, negligee, tete-a-tete, expose, resume, hofbrau, 
and scores of other loan-words. Cafe is seldom seen with its accent, 
nor is sehor or divorcee or attach. In fact, says a recent critic, 54 
“the omission of the diacritic is universal. Even the English press 
of French New Orleans ignores it.” 55 This critic lists some rather 
amazing barbarisms, among them standchen for stdndchen in Littell’s 
Living Age, outre for outre in Judge, and Poincaire, Poincare and 
Poinciarre for Poincare in an unnamed newspaper. He gives an 
amusing account of the struggles of American newspapers with 
the dansant. He says: 

Put this through the hopper of the typesetting machine, and it comes forth, 
“the the dansant” —which even Oshkosh finds intolerable. The thing was, 
however, often attempted when thes dansants came into fashion, and with 
various results. Generally the proof-reader eliminates one of the the’s, making 
dansant a quasi-noun, and to this day one reads of people giving or attending 
dansants. Latterly the public taste seems to favor dansante, which doubtless 
has a Frenchier appearance, provided you are sufficiently ignorant of the 
Gallic tongue. Two other solutions of the difficulty may be noted: 

Among those present at the “ the dansant” ; 

Among those present at the the-dansant; 
that is, either a hyphen or quotation marks set off the exotic phrase. 

Even when American newspapers essay to use accents, they com¬ 
monly use them incorrectly. The same critic reports Pierre for 
Pierre, md for ma, and buffet, buffet, buffet and even buffet for 
buffet. But they seldom attempt to use them, and in this iconoclasm 
they are supported by at least one professor, Brander Matthews. In 
speaking of naive and naivete, which he welcomes because “we have 

64 Charles Fitzhugh Talman: Accents Wild, Atlantic Monthly, Dec., 1915, 

p. 807 ff. . 

66 The American State Department, ordinarily very conservative and English 

has boldly abandoned vise for visa. 


258 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


no exact equivalent for either word,” he says: “but they wall need 
to shed their accents and to adapt themselves somehow to the tradi¬ 
tions of our orthography.” 56 He goes on: “After we have decided 
that the foreign word w r e find knocking at the doors of English [he 
really means American, as the context shows] is likely to be useful, 
we must fit it for naturalization by insisting that it shall shed its 
accents, if it has any; that it shall change its spelling, if this is 
necessary; that it shall modify its pronunciation, if this is not 
easy for us to compass; and that it shall conform to all our speech- 
habits, especially in the formation of the plural.” This counsel is 
heeded by the great majority of American printers. I have found 
bozart (for beaux arts) on the first page of a leading American 
newspaper, and a large textile corporation widely advertises Bozart 
rugs. Expose long since lost its accent and is now commonly pro¬ 
nounced to rhyme with propose. Schmierka.se has become smear- 
lease. The sauer, in sauer-kraut and sauer-braten, is often spelled 
sour. Cole-slaw, by the law of Hobson-Jobson, has become cold-slaw. 
Canon is canyon. I have even seen jonteel, in a trade name, for the 
French gentil. 

American newspapers seldom distinguish between the masculine 
and feminine forms of common loan-words. Blond and blonde are 
used indiscriminately. The majority of papers, apparently mistak¬ 
ing blond for a simplified form of blonde, use it to designate both 
sexes. So with employee, divorcee, fiancee, debutante, etc. Here 
the* feminine form is preferred; no doubt it has been helped into use 
in the case of the -ee words by the analogy of devotee. In all cases, 
of course, the accents are omitted. In the formation of the plural 
American adopts native forms much more quickly than English. All 
the English authorities that I have consulted advocate retaining the 
foreign plurals of most of the loan-words in daily use, e. g., sana¬ 
toria, appendices, indices, virtuosi, formulae, libretti, media, thes- 
dansants, monsignori. But American usage favors plurals of native 
design, and sometimes they take quite fantastic forms. I have ob¬ 
served delicatessens, monsignors, virtuosos, rathskellers, kindergar¬ 
tens, nucleuses and appendixes. Even the Joumal of the American 

69 Why Not Speak Your Own Language?, Delineator, Nov., 1917, p. 12. 




AMERICAN SPELLING 


259 


Medical Association, a highly scientific authority, goes so far as to 
approve curriculums and septums. Banditti, in place of bandits, 
would seem an affectation to an American, and so would soprani for 
sopranos and soli for solos. Both English and American labor under 
the lack of native plurals for the two everyday titles, Mister and 
Missus. In the written speech, and in the more exact forms of the 
spoken speech, the French plurals, Messieurs and Mesdames, are 
used, hut in the ordinary spoken speech, at least in America, they are 
avoided by circumlocution. When Messieurs has to be spoken it is 
almost invariably pronounced messers, and in the same way Mes¬ 
dames becomes mez-dames, with the first syllable rhyming with sez 
and the second, which bears the accent, with games. In place of 
Mesdames a more natural form, Madames, seems to be gaining 
ground in America. Thus, I have found Dames du Sacre Cceur 
translated as Madames of the Sacred Heart in a Catholic paper of 
wide circulation, 57 and the form is apparently used by American 
members of the community. 

Dr. Louise Pound 58 notes that a number of Latin plurals tend to 
become singular nouns in colloquial American, notably curricula, 
data, dicta, insignia and strata, and with them a few Greek plurals, 
e. g., criteria and phenomena. She reports hearing the following 
uses of them: “The curricula of the institution is being changed,” 
“This data is very significant,” “The dicta, ‘Go West/ is said to 
have come from Horace Greeley,” “What is that insignia on his 
sleeve ?”, “This may be called the Renaissance strata of loan-words,” 
“That is no criteria ” and “What a strange phenomena!” —all by 
speakers presumed to be of some education. The error leads to the 
creation of double plurals, e. g., curriculas, insignias, stratas, stim- 
ulis, alumnis, baciUis, narcissis. The Latin names of plants lead to 
frequent blunders. Cosmos and gladiolus are felt to be plurals, and 
from them, by folk-etymology, come the false singulars, cosma and 
gladiola .. Dr. Pound notes many other barbarous plurals, not men¬ 
tioned above, e. g., antennas, cerebras, alumnas, alumnuses, narcis- 

” Irish World, June 26, 1918. 

“The Pluralization of Latin Loan-Words in Present-Day American Speech, 
Classical Journal, vol. xv, no. 3 (Dec., 1919). 


260 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


suses, apparatuses, emporiums, opuses, criterions, amcebas, cactuses, 
phenomenons. 


7. 

Minor Differences 

In capitalization the English are a good deal more conservative 
than we are. They invariably capitalize such terms as Government, 
Prime Minister and Society, when used as proper nouns; they cap¬ 
italize Press, Pulpit, Bar, etc., almost as often. In America a 
movement against this use of capitals appeared during the latter 
part of the eighteenth century. In Jefferson’s first draft of the 
Declaration of Independence nature and creator, and even god are 
in lower case. 59 During the 20’s and 30’s of the succeeding century, 
probably as a result of French influence, the movement against the 
capitals went so far that the days of the week were often spelled 
with small initial letters, and even Mr. became mr. Curiously 
enough, the most striking exhibition of this tendency of late years 
is offered by an English work of the highest scholarship, the Cam¬ 
bridge History of English Literature. It uses the lower case for all 
titles, even baron and colonel before proper names, and also avoids 
capitals in such words as presbyterian, catholic and Christian, and 
in the second parts of such terms as Westminster abbey and Atlantic 
ocean. 

There are also certain differences in punctuation. The English, 
as everyone knows, put a comma after the street number of a house, 
making it, for example, 31, \, St. James's street . 60 They usually insert 
a comma instead of a period after the hour when giving the time in 
figures, e. g., 9,27, and omit the 0 when indicating less than 10 min¬ 
utes, e. g., 8,7, instead of 8.07. They do not use the period as the 
mark of the decimal, but employ a dot at the level of the upper dot of 
a colon, as in S'llf.16. They cling to the hyphen in such words as 
to-day, to-night and good-bye; it begins to disappear in America. 

“A correspondent tells me that, in the manuscripts of Jefferson’s letters, 
even sentences are begun with small letters. 

00 This custom is sometimes imitated by American Anglophiles, but it is cer¬ 
tainly not general in the United States. 



AMERICAN SPELLING 


261 


They are far more careful than we are to retain the apostrophe in 
possessive forms of nouns used in combination, e. g., St. Mary's 
Church, ladies' room. 61 When they write 8/10/22 they mean 
October 8th, not August 10th, as is usual with us. 

There remains a class of differences that may as well be noticed 
under spelling, though they are not strictly orthographical. Sper 
cialty, aluminum and alarm offer examples. In English they are 
speciality, aluminium and alarum, though alarm is also an alterna¬ 
tive form. Specialty, in America, is always accented on the first 
syllable; speciality, in England, on the third. The result is two 
distinct words, though their meaning is identical. How aluminium, 
in America, lost its fourth syllable I have been unable to determine, 
but all American authorities now make it aluminum and all Eng¬ 
lish authorities stick to aluminium. Perhaps the boric-boracic pair 
also belongs here. In American boric is now almost universally pre¬ 
ferred, but it is also making progress in England. How the differ¬ 
ence between the English behove and the American behoove arose I 
do not know. It is merely orthographical; both forms rhyme with 
prove. Equally mysterious is the origin of the American snicker, 
apparently a decadent form of the English snigger. 

a Cf. The Use of the Apostrophe in Firm Names, by Leigh B, Irvine; San 
Francisco, 1908. 


IX. 


THE COMMON SPEECH 

1 . 

Grammarians and Their Ways 

So far, in the main, the language examined has been of a rela¬ 
tively pretentious and self-conscious variety—the speech, if not 
always of formal discourse, then at least of literate men. Most 
of the examples of its vocabulary and idiom, in fact, have been 
drawn from written documents or from written reports of more or 
less careful utterances, for example, the speeches of members of 
Congress and of other public men. The whole of Thornton’s excel¬ 
lent material is of this character. In his dictionary there is scarcely 
a locution that is not supported by printed examples. 

It must be obvious that such materials, however lavishly set forth, 
cannot exhibit the methods and tendencies of a living speech with 
anything approaching completeness, nor even with accuracy. What 
men put into writing and what they say when they take sober 
thought are very far from what they utter in everyday conversa¬ 
tion. All of us, no matter how careful our speech habits, loosen the 
belt a bit, so to speak, when we talk familiarly to our fellows, 
and pay a good deal less heed to precedents and proprieties, per¬ 
haps, than we ought to. It was a sure instinct that made Ibsen 
put “bad grammar” into the mouth of Nora Helmar in “A Doll’s 
House.” She is a general’s daughter and the wife of a professor, 
but even professors’ wives are not above occasional bogglings of 
the cases of pronouns and the conjugations of verbs. The professors 
themselves, in truth, must have the same habit, for sometimes they 
show plain signs of it in print. More than once, plowing through 
profound and interminable treatises of grammar and syntax during 

262 



THE COMMON SPEECH 


263 


the writing and revision of the present work, I have encountered the 
cheering spectacle of one grammarian exposing, with contagious 
joy, the grammatical lapses of some other grammarian. And nine 
times out of ten, a few pages further on, I have found the enchanted 
purist erring himself. 1 The most funereal of the sciences is saved 
from utter horror by such displays of human malice and fallibility. 
Speech itself, indeed, would become almost impossible if the gram¬ 
marians could follow their own rules unfailingly, and were always 
right. 

But here we are among the learned, and their sins, when detected 
and exposed, are at least punished by conscience. What are of 
more importance, to those interested in language as a living thing, 
are the offendings of the millions who are not conscious of any wrong. 
It is among these millions, ignorant of regulation and eager only 
to express their ideas clearly and forcefully, that language under¬ 
goes its great changes and constantly renews its vitality. These are 
the genuine makers of grammar, marching miles ahead of the formal 
grammarians. Like the Emperor Sigismund, each man among them 
may well say: “Ego sum . . . supra grammaticam” It is compe¬ 
tent for any individual to offer his contribution—his new word, his 
better idiom, his novel figure of speech, his short cut in grammar or 
syntax—and it is by the general vote of the whole body, not by the 
verdict of a small school, that the fate of the innovation is decided. 
As Brander Matthews says, there is not even representative govern¬ 
ment in the matter; the posse comitatus decides directly, and despite 
the sternest protest, finally. The ignorant, the rebellious and the 
daring come forward with their brilliant barbarisms; the learned 
and conservative bring up their objections. “And when both sides 
have been heard, there is a show of hands; and by this the irrevocable 
decision of the community itself is rendered.” 2 Thus it was that 
the Romance languages were fashioned out of the wreck of Latin, 
the vast influence of the literate minority to the contrary notwith¬ 
standing. Thus it was, too, that English lost its case inflections 
and many of its old conjugations, and that our yes came to be sub- 

1 Sweet, perhaps the abbot of the order, makes almost indecent haste to sin. 
See the second paragraph on the very first page of vol. i of his New English 
Grammar. 

* Tale Review, April, 1918, p. 548. 



264 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


stituted for the gea-swa {= yea be it) of an earlier day, and that 
our stark pronoun of the first person was precipitated from the 
Gothic ik. And thus it is that, in our own day, the language faces 
forces in America which, not content with overhauling and greatly 
enriching its materials, now threaten to work changes in its very 
structure. 

Where these tendencies run strongest, of course, is on the plane 
of the vulgar spoken language. Among all classes the everyday 
speech departs very far from orthodox English, and even very far 
from any recognized spoken English, but among the lower classes 
that make up the great body of the people it gets so far from ortho¬ 
dox English that it gives promise, soon or late, of throwing off its 
old bonds altogether, or, at any rate, all save the loosest of them. 
Behind it is the gigantic impulse that I have described in earlier 
chapters: the impulse of an egoistic and iconoclastic people, facing a 
new order of life in highly self-conscious freedom, to break a rela¬ 
tively stable language, long since emerged from its period of growth, 
to their novel and multitudinous needs, and, above all, to their ex¬ 
perimental and impatient spirit. This impulse, it must be plain, 
would war fiercely upon any attempt at formal regulation, however 
prudent and elastic; it is often rebellious for the mere sake of rebel¬ 
lion. But what it comes into conflict with, in America, is nothing 
so politic, and hence nothing so likely to keep the brakes upon it. 
What it actually encounters here is a formalism that is artificial, 
illogical and almost unintelligible—a formalism borrowed from Eng¬ 
lish grammarians, and by them brought into English, against all 
fact and reason, from the Latin. “In most of our grammars, per¬ 
haps in all of those issued earlier than the opening of the twentieth 
century,” says Matthews, “we find linguistic laws laid down which 
are in blank contradiction with the genius of the language.” 8 In 
brief, the American school-boy, hauled before a pedagogue to be 
instructed in the structure and organization of the tongue he speaks, 
is actually instructed in the structure and organization of a tongue 
that he never hears at all, and seldom reads, and that, in more than 
one of the characters thus set before him, does not even exist. 

*Yale Review, op. cit., p. 560. See also Is Grammar Useless? by Walter 
Guest Kellogg, North American Remew, July, 1920. 


THE COMMON SPEECH 


265 


The effects of this are twofold. On the one hand he conceives 
an antipathy to a subject so lacking in intelligibility and utility. As 
one teacher puts it, “pupils tire of it; often they see nothing in it, 
because there is nothing in it.” 4 And on the other hand, the school¬ 
boy goes entirely without sympathetic guidance in the living lan¬ 
guage that he actually speaks, in and out of the classroom, and that 
he will probably speak all the rest of his life. All he hears in 
relation to it is a series of sneers and prohibitions, most of them 
grounded, not upon principles deduced from its own nature, but 
upon its divergences from the theoretical language that he is so 
unsuccessfully taught. The net result is that all the instruction he 
receives passes for naught. It is not sufficient to make him a master 
of orthodox English and it is not sufficient to rid him of the speech- 
habits of his home and daily life. Thus he is thrown back upon 
those speech-habits without any helpful restraint or guidance, and 
they make him a willing ally of the radical and often extravagant 
tendencies which show themselves in the vulgar tongue. In other 
words, the very effort to teach him an excessively tight and formal 
English promotes his use of a loose and rebellious English. And 
so the grammarians, with the traditional fatuity of their order, 
labor for the destruction of the grammar they defend, and for the 
decay of all those refinements of speech that go with it. 

The folly of this system, of course, has not failed to attract the 
attention of the more intelligent teachers, nor have they failed to 
observe the causes of its failure. “Much of the fruitlessness of the 
study of English grammar,” says Wilcox, 5 “and many of the ob¬ 
stacles encountered in its study are due to The difficulties created 
by the grammarians.’ These difficulties arise chiefly from three 
sources—excessive classification, multiplication of terms for a single 
conception, and the attempt to treat the English language as if it 
were highly inflected.” Dr. Otto Jespersen puts them a bit differ¬ 
ently. “Ordinary grammars,” he says, “in laying down their rules, 
are too apt to forget that the English language is one thing, com- 

4 The Difficulties Created by Grammarians Are to Be Ignored, by W. H. 
Wilcox, Atlantic Educational Journal , Nov., 1912, p. 8. The title of this 
article is quoted from ministerial instructions of 1909 to the teachers of 
French lyc4es. 

5 Op. cit., p. 7. Mr. Wilcox is an instructor in the Maryland State Normal 
School. 




266 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


mon-sense or logic another thing, and Latin grammar a third, and 
that these three things have really, in many cases, very little to do 
with one another. Schoolmasters generally have an astonishing 
talent for not observing real linguistic facts, and an equally astonish¬ 
ing inclination to stamp everything as faulty that does not agree 
with their narrow rules.” 6 So long ago as the 60’s Richard Grant 
White began an onslaught upon all such punditic stupidities. He 
saw clearly that “the attempt to treat English as if it were highly 
inflected” was making its intelligent study almost impossible, and 
proposed boldly that all English grammar-books be burned. 7 Of 
late his ideas have begun to gain a certain acceptance, and as the 
literature of denunciation has grown 8 the grammarians have been 
constrained to overhaul their texts. When I was a school-boy, dur¬ 
ing the penultimate decade of the last century, the chief American 
grammar was “A Practical Grammar of the English Language,” 
by Thomas W. Hlarvey. 9 This formidable work was almost purely 
synthetical: it began with a long series of definitions, wholly un¬ 
intelligible to a child, and proceeded into a maddening maze of 
pedagogical distinctions, puzzling even to an adult. The latter-day 
grammars, at least those for the elementary schools, are far more 
analytical and logical. Eor example, there is “Longman’s Briefer 
Grammar,” by George J. Smith, 10 a text now in very wide use. 
This book starts off, not with page after page of abstractions, but 
with a well-devised examination of the complete sentence, and the 
characters and relations of the parts of speech are very simply and 
clearly developed. But before the end the author begins to suc¬ 
cumb to precedent, and on page 114 I find paragraph after para¬ 
graph of such dull, flyblown pedantry as this: 

“^Chapters on English; London, 1918, p. 49. 

7 See especially chapters ix and x of Words and Their Uses and chapters 
xvii, xviii and xix of Every-Day English; also the preface to the latter, p. xi 
et seq. The study of other languages has been made difficult by the same 
attempt to force the characters of Greek and Latin grammar upon them. One 
finds a protest against the process, for example, in E. H. Palmer’s Grammar 
of Hindustani, Persian and Arabic; London, 1906. In all ages, indeed, gram¬ 
marians appear to have been fatuous. The learned will remember Aristophanes’ 
ridicule of them in The Clouds, 660-690. 

8 The case is well summarized in Simpler English Grammar, by Patterson 
Wardlaw, Bull, of the University of 8. Carolina, no. 38, pt. iii, July, 1914. 

8 Cincinnati, 1868; rev. ed., 1878. 

10 New York, 1903; rev. ed., 1915. 



THE COMMON SPEECH 


267 


Some Intransitive Verbs are used to link the Subject and some Adjective or 
Noun. These Verbs are called Copulative Verbs, and the Adjective or Noun 
is called the Attribute. 

The Attribute always describes or denotes the person or thing denoted by 
the Subject. 

Verbals are words that are derived from Verbs and express action or being 
without asserting it. Infinitives and Participles are Verbals. 

And so on. Smith, in his preface, says that his book is intended, 
“not so much to ‘cover’ the subject of grammar, as to teach it,” and 
calls attention to the fact, somewhat proudly, that he has omitted 
“the rather hard subject of gerunds,” all mention of conjunctive 
adverbs, and even the conjugation of verbs. Nevertheless, he im¬ 
merses himself in the mythical objective case of nouns on page 108, 
and does not emerge until the end. 11 “The New-Webster-Cooley 
Course in English,” 12 another popular text, carries reform a step 
further. The subject of case is approached through the personal 
pronouns, where it retains its only surviving intelligibility, and the 
more lucid object form is used in place of objective case. More¬ 
over, the pupil is plainly informed, later on, that “a noun has in 
reality but two case-forms: a possessive and a common case-form.” 
This is the best concession to the facts yet made by a text-book gram¬ 
marian. But no one familiar with the habits of the pedagogical 
mind need be told that its interior pull is against even such mild 
and obvious reforms. Defenders of the old order are by no means 
silent; a fear seems to prevail that grammar, robbed of its imbecile 
classifications, may collapse entirely. Wilcox records how the Coun¬ 
cil of English Teachers of New Jersey, but a few years ago, spoke 
out boldly for the recognition of no less than five cases in English. 

11 Even Sweet, though he bases his New English Grammar upon the spoken 
language and thus sets the purists at defiance, quickly succumbs to the labelling 
mania. Thus his classification of tenses includes such fabulous monsters as 
these: continuous, recurrent, neutral, definite, indefinite, secondary, incomplete, 
inchoate, short and long. Worse still, Dr. Jespersen himself, the arch-enemy 
of pedants, proposes in his new grammatical nomenclature some truly appall¬ 
ing terms, e.g., quaternary element, clause adjunct, compositional adjunct 
shifted subjunct-adjunct, adjective-subjunct and adverbial semi-predicative 
post-adjunct. See his Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, 2 
vols.; Heidelberg, 1922. These new monsters were denounced in the Literary 
Supplement of the London Times on June 1 and June 15, 1922, by E. A. Son- 
nenschein, chairman of the English Standing Committee on Grammatical 
Reform. 

13 By W. F. Webster and Alice Woodworth Cooley; Boston, 1903; rev. eds., 
1905 and 1909. The authors are Minneapolis teachers. 


268 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


“Why five?” asks Wilcox. “Why not eight, or ten, or even thirteen? 
Undoubtedly because there are five cases in Latin.” 13 Most of 
the current efforts at improvement, in fact, tend toward a mere 
revision and multiplication of classifications; the pedant is eternally 
convinced that pigeon-holing and relabelling are contributions to 
knowledge. A curious proof in point is offered by a pamphlet en¬ 
titled “Reorganization of English in Secondary Schools,” compiled 
by James Fleming Hosic and issued by the National Bureau of 
Education. 14 The aim of this pamphlet is to rid the teaching of 
English, including grammar, of its accumulated formalism and in¬ 
effectiveness—to make it genuine instruction instead of a pedantic 
and meaningless routine. And how is this revolutionary aim set 
forth ? By a meticulous and merciless splitting of hairs, a gigantic 
manufacture of classifications and sub-classifications, a colossal dis¬ 
play of professorial bombast and flatulence! 

I could cite many other examples. Perhaps, after all, the disease 
is incurable. What such laborious stupidity shows at bottom is 
simply this: that the sort of man who is willing to devote his life 
to teaching grammar to children, or to training schoolmarms to 
do it, is not often the sort of man who is intelligent enough to do it 
competently. In particular, he is not often intelligent enough to 
deal with the fluent and ever-amazing permutations of a living 
and rebellious speech. The only way he can grapple with it at all is 
by first reducing it to a fixed and formal organization—in brief, 
by first killing it and embalming it. The difference in the resultant 
proceedings is not unlike that between a. gross dissection and a 
surgical operation. The difficulties of the former are quickly mas¬ 
tered by any student of normal sense, but even the most casual of 
laparotomies calls for a man of special skill and address. Thus the 
elementary study of the national language, at least in America, is 
almost monopolized by dullards. Children are taught it by men 
and women who observe it inaccurately and expound it ignorantly. 
In most other fields the pedagogue meets a certain corrective compe¬ 
tition and criticism. The teacher of any branch of applied me¬ 
chanics or mathematics, for example, has practical engineers at his 
elbow and they quickly expose and denounce his defects; the college 

“Op. oit., p. 8. 

14 Bulletin No. 2; Washington, 1917. 


THE COMMON SPEECH 


269 


teacher of chemistry, however limited his equipment, at least has the 
aid of text-books written by actual chemists. But English, even in 
its most formal shapes, is chiefly taught by those who cannot write 
it decently and get no aid from those who can. One wades through 
treatise after treatise on English style by pedagogues whose own 
style is atrocious. A Huxley or a Macaulay might have written one 
of high merit and utility—but Huxley and Macaulay had other fish 
to fry, and so the business was left to Prof. Balderdash. Consider 
the standard texts on prosody—vast piles of meaningless words— 
hollow babble about spondees, iambics, trochees and so on—idiotic 
borrowings from dead languages. Two poets, Poe and Lanier, blew 
blasts of fresh air through the fog, but they had no successors, and 
it has apparently closed in again. In the department of prose it 
lies wholly unbroken; no first-rate writer of English prose has ever 
written a text-book upon the art of writing it. 


2 . 

Spoken American As It Is 

But here I wander afield. The art of prose has little to do with 
the stiff and pedantic English taught in grammar-schools and a 
great deal less to do with the loose and lively English spoken by the 
average American in his daily traffic. The thing of importance is 
that the two differ from each other even more than they differ 
from the English of a Huxley or a Stevenson. The school-marm, 
directed by grammarians, labors heroically, but all her effort goes 
for naught. The young American, like the youngster of any other 
race, inclines irresistibly toward the dialect that he hears at home, 
and that dialect, with its piquant neologisms, its high disdain of 
precedent, its complete lack of self-consciousness, is almost the 
antithesis of the hard and stiff speech that is expounded out of 
books. It derives its principles, not from the subtle logic of learned 
and stupid men, but from the rough-and-ready logic of every day. 
It has a vocabulary of its own, a syntax of its own, even a grammar 
of its own. Its verbs are conjugated in a way that defies all the 
injunctions of the grammar books; it has its contumacious rules 




270 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


of tense, number and case; it has boldly re-established the double 
negative, once sound in English; it admits double comparatives, 
confusions in person, clipped infinitives; it lays hands on the vowels, 
changing them to fit its obscure but powerful spirit; it repudiates 
all the finer distinctions between the parts of speech. 

This highly virile and defiant dialect, and not the fossilized Eng¬ 
lish of the school-marm and her books, is the speech of the Middle 
American of Joseph Jacobs’ composite picture—the mill-hand in 
a small city of Indiana, with his five years of common schooling be¬ 
hind him, his diligent reading of newspapers, and his proud mem¬ 
bership in the Order of Foresters and the Knights of the Maccabees. 15 
Go into any part of the country, North, East, South or West, and 
you will find multitudes of his brothers, car conductors in Philadel¬ 
phia, immigrants of the second generation in the East Side of New 
York, iron-workers in the Pittsburgh region, corner grocers in St. 
Louis, holders of petty political jobs in Atlanta and New Orleans, 
small farmers in Kansas or Kentucky, house carpenters in Ohio, tin¬ 
ners and plumbers in Chicago—genuine Americans all, bawling 
patriots, hot for the home team, marchers in parades, readers of the 
yellow newspapers, fathers of families, sheep on election day, un¬ 
distinguished norms of the Homo Americanus. Such typical Amer¬ 
icans, after a fashion, know English. They read it—all save the 
“hard” words, i. e., all save about 90 per cent of the words of Greek 
and Latin origin. 16 They can understand perhaps two-thirds of it 
as it comes from the lips of a political orator or clerygman. They 
have a feeling that it is, in some recondite sense, superior to the 
common speech of their kind. They recognize a fluent command 
of it as the salient mark of a “smart” and “educated” man, one 
with “the gift of gab.” But they themselves never speak it or try 
to speak it, nor do they look with approbation on efforts in that di¬ 
rection by their fellows. 

In no other way, indeed, is the failure of popular education made 
more vividly manifest. Despite a gigantic effort to enforce certain 
speech habits, universally in operation from end to end of the coun¬ 
try, the masses of people turn almost unanimously to very different 
speech habits, nowhere advocated and seldom so much as even ac- 

15 The Middle American, American Magazine, March, 1907. 

19 Cf. White: Every-Day English, p. 367 ff. 


THE COMMON SPEECH 


271 


curately observed. The literary critic, Francis Hackett, somewhere 
speaks of “the enormous gap between the literate and unliterate 
American.” He is apparently the first to call attention to it. It is 
the national assumption that no such gap exists—that all Americans, 
at least if they be white, are so outfitted with sagacity in the public 
schools that they are competent to consider any public question 
intelligently and to follow its discussion with understanding. But 
the truth is, of course, that the public school accomplishes no such 
magic. The inferior man, in America as elsewhere, remains an 
inferior man despite the hard effort made to improve him, and 
his thoughts seldom if ever rise above the most elemental concerns. 
What lies above not only does not interest him; it actually excites 
his derision, and he has coined a unique word, high-brow, to express 
his view of it. Especially in speech is he suspicious of superior 
pretension. The school-boy of the lower orders would bring down 
ridicule upon himself, and perhaps criticism still more devastating, 
if he essayed to speak what his teachers conceive to be correct Eng¬ 
lish, or even correct American, outside the school-room. On the one 
hand his companions would laugh at him as a prig, and on the other 
hand his parents would probably cane him as an impertinent critic 
of their own speech. Once he has made his farewell to the school- 
marm, all her diligence in this department goes for nothing. 17 The 
boys with whom he plays baseball speak a tongue that is not the one 
taught in school, and so do the youths with whom he will begin 
learning a trade tomorrow, and the girl he will marry later on, and 
the bootleggers, star pitchers, vaudeville comedians, business 
sharpers and political mountebanks he will look up to and try to 
imitate all the rest of his life. 

So far as I can discover, there has been but one attempt by a 
competent authority to determine the special characters of this gen¬ 
eral tongue of the mobile vulgus. That authority is Dr. W. W. 
Charters, now Professor of Education at the Carnegie Institute of 
Technology, Pittsburgh. In 1914 Dr. Charters was dean of the fac¬ 
ulty of education and professor of the theory of teaching in the Uni¬ 
versity of Missouri, and one of the problems he was engaged upon 
was that of the teaching of grammar. In the course of this study he 
encountered the theory that such instruction should be confined to the 
17 Cf. Sweet: New English Grammar, vol. i, p. 5. 


272 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


rules habitually violated—that the one aim of teaching grammar was 
to correct the speech of the pupils, and that it was useless to harass 
them with principles which they already instinctively observed. Ap¬ 
parently inclining to this somewhat dubious notion, Dr. Charters 
applied to the School Board of Kansas City for permission to under¬ 
take an examination of the language actually used by the children in 
the elementary schools of that city, and this permission was granted. 
The materials thereupon gathered were of two classes. First, the 
teachers of grades III to YII inclusive in all the Kansas City public 
schools were instructed to turn over to Dr. Charters all the written 
work of their pupils, “ordinarily done in the regular order of school 
work” during a period of four weeks. Secondly, the teachers of 
grades II to VII inclusive were instructed to make note of “all oral 
errors in grammar made in the school-rooms and around the school- 
buildings” during the five school-days of one week, by children of any 
age, and to dispatch these notes to Dr. Charters also. The result was 
an accumulation of material so huge that it was unworkable with the 
means at hand, and so the investigator and his assistants reduced it. 
Of the oral reports, two studies were made, the first of those from 
grades III and VII and the second of those from grades VI and 
VII. Of the written reports, only those from grades VI and VII 
of twelve typical schools were examined. 

The ages thus covered ran from nine or ten to fourteen or fifteen, 
and perhaps five-sixths of the material studied came from children 
above twelve. Its examination threw a brilliant light upon the 
speech actually employed by children near the end of their schooling 
in a typical American city, and per corollary, upon the speech em¬ 
ployed by their parents and other older associates. If anything, the 
grammatical and syntactical habits revealed were a bit less loose 
than those of the authentic Volkssprache, for practically all of the 
written evidence was gathered under conditions which naturally 
caused the writers to try to write what they conceived to be correct 
English, and even the oral evidence was conditioned by the admoni¬ 
tory presence of the teacher. Moreover, it must be obvious that a 
child of the lower classes, during the period of its actual study of 
grammar, probably speaks better English than at any time before 
or afterward, for it is only then that any positive pressure is exerted 



THE COMMON SPEECH 


273 


upon it to that end. But even so, the departures from standard 
usage that were unearthed were numerous and striking, and their 
tendency to accumulate in definite groups showed plainly the work¬ 
ing of general laws. 18 

Thus, no less than 57 per cent of the oral errors reported hy the 
teachers of grades III and VII involved the use of the verb, and 
nearly half of these, or 24 per cent of the total, involved a con¬ 
fusion of the past tense form and the perfect participle. Again, 
double negatives constituted 11 per cent of the errors, and the misuse 
of adjectives or of adjectival forms for adverbs ran to 4 per cent. 
Finally, the difficulties of the objective case among the pronouns, 
the last stronghold of that case in English, were responsible for 7 
per cent, thus demonstrating a clear tendency to get rid of it alto¬ 
gether. Now compare the errors of these children, half of whom, 
as I have just said, were in grade III, and hence wholly uninstructed 
in formal grammar, with the errors made by children of the second 
oral group—that is, children of grades VI and VII, in both of 
which grammar is studied. Dr. Charters’ tabulations show scarcely 
any difference in the character and relative rank of the errors dis¬ 
covered. Those in the use of the verb drop from 57 per cent of 
the total to 52 per cent, but the double negatives remain at 7 per cent 
and the errors in the cases of pronouns at 11 per cent. 

In the written work of grades VI and VII, however, certain 
changes appear, no doubt because of the special pedagogical effort 
against the more salient oral errors. The child, pen in hand, has 
in mind the cautions oftenest heard, and so reveals something of 
that greater exactness which all of us show when we do any writing 
that must bear critical inspection. Thus, the relative frequency of 
confusion between the past tense forms of verbs and the perfect 
participles drops from 24 per cent to 5 per cent, and errors based on 
double negatives drop to 1 per cent. But this improvement in one 
direction merely serves to unearth new barbarisms in other direc¬ 
tions, concealed in the oral tables by the flood of errors now 
remedied. It is among the verbs that they are still most numerous; 

18 Dr. Charters’ report appears as Vol. XVI, No. 2, University of Missouri 
Bulletin , Education Series No. 9, Jan., 1915. He was aided in his inquiry by 
Edith Miller, teacher of English in one of the St. Louis high-schools. 


274 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


\ 

altogether the errors here amount to exactly 50 per cent of the total. 
Such locutions as I had went and he seen diminish relatively and 
absolutely, hut in all other situations the verb is treated with the 
lavish freedom that is so characteristic of the American common 
speech. Confusions of the past and present tenses jump relatively 
from 2 per cent to 19 per cent, thus eloquently demonstrating the 
tenacity of the error. And mistakes in the forms of nouns and pro¬ 
nouns increase from 2 per cent to 19: a shining proof of a shakiness 
which follows the slightest effort to augment the vocabulary of every¬ 
day. 

The materials collected by Dr. Charters and his associates are 
not, of course, presented in full, but his numerous specimens must 
strike familiar chords in every ear that is alert to the sounds and 
ways of the sermo vulgaris. What he gathered in Kansas City might 
have been gathered just as well in San Francisco, or New Orleans, or 
Chicago 1 , or New York, or in Youngstown, O., or Little Rock, Ark., 
or Waterloo, Iowa. In each of these places, large or small, a few 
localisms might have been noted —oi substituted for ur in New York, 
yourall in the South, a few Germanisms in Pennsylvania and in the 
upper Mississippi Valley, a few Spanish locutions in the Southwest, 
certain peculiar vowel-forms in New England—but in the main 
the report would have been identical with the report he makes. 
“Relatively few Americans,” says Krapp, 19 “spend all their lives 
in one locality, and even if they do, they cannot possibly escape 
coming into contact with Americans from other localities. ... We 
can distinguish with some certainty Eastern and Western and South¬ 
ern speech, but beyond this the author has little confidence in those 
confident experts who think they can tell infallibly, by the test of 
speech, a native of Hartford from a native of Providence, or a 
native of Philadelphia from a native of Atlanta, or even, if one insist 
on infallibility, a native of Chicago from a native of Boston.” 
Krapp is discussing the so-called “standard” speech; on the plane of 
the vulgate the levelling is quite as apparent. That vast uniformity 
which marks the people of the United States, in political doctrine, 
in social habit, in general information, in reaction to ideas, in 
prejudices and enthusiasms, in the veriest details of domestic cus- 
19 The Pronunciation of Standard English in America; New York, 1919, p. viii. 



THE COMMON SPEECH 


275 


tom and dress, is nowhere more marked, in truth, than in their 
speech habits. The incessant neologisms of the national dialect 
sweep the whole country almost instantly, and the iconoclastic changes 
which its popular spoken form is constantly undergoing show them¬ 
selves from coast to coast. “He hurt hisself,” cited by Dr. Charters, 
is surely anything but a Missouri localism; one hears it everywhere. 
And so, too, one hears “she invited him and I” and “it hurt ter¬ 
rible” and “I set there,” and “this here man,” and “no, I never, 
neither” and “he ain't here,” and “where is he at?” and “it seems 
like I remember,” and “if I was you,” and “us fellows,” and “he 
give her hell.” And “he taken and kissed her,” and “he loaned me 
a dollar,” and “the man was found two dollars,” and “the bee stang 
him,” and “I wouldda thought,” and “can I have one ?” and “he got 
hisn” and “the boss left him off,” and “the baby et the soap,” and 
“them are the kind I like,” and “he don’t care,” and “no one has 
their ticket,” and “how is the folks?” and “if you would of gotten 
in the car you could of rode down.” 

Curiously enough, this widely dispersed and highly savory dialect 
—already, as I shall show, come to a certain grammatical regularity 
—has attracted the professional winters of the country almost as 
little as it has attracted the philologists. There are foreshadowings 
of it in “Huckleberry Finn,” in “The Biglow Papers” and even in 
the rough humor of the period that began with J. C. Heal and com¬ 
pany and ended with Artemus Ward and Josh Billings, but in 
those early days it had not yet come to full flower; it wanted the 
influence of the later immigrations to take on its present character. 
The enormous dialect literature of twenty years ago left it almost 
untouched. Localisms were explored diligently, but the general 
dialect went virtually unobserved. It is not in “Chimmie Fadden” ; 
it is not in “David Harum”; it is not even in the pre-fable stories 
of George Ade, perhaps the most acute observer of average, un¬ 
distinguished American types, urban and rustic, that American 
literature has yet produced. The business of reducing it to print 
had to wait for Ring W. Lardner, a Chicago newspaper reporter. 
In his grotesque tales of base-ball players^ so immediately and so 


276 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


deservedly successful, 20 Lardner reports the common speech not 
only with humor, but also with the utmost accuracy. The observa¬ 
tions of Charters and his associates are here reinforced by the sharp 
ear of one especially competent, and the result is a mine of authentic 
American. 

In a single story by Lardner, in truth, it is usually possible to 
discover examples of almost every logical and grammatical pe¬ 
culiarity of the emerging language, and he always resists very 
stoutly the temptation to overdo the thing. Here, for example, 
are a few typical sentences from “The Busher’s Honeymoon”: 21 

I and Florrie was married the day before yesterday just like I told you we 
was going to be. . . . You was to get married in Bedford, where not nothing 
is nearly half so dear. . . . The sum of what I have lorote down is $29.40. 

. . . Allen told me I should ought to give the priest $5. ... I never seen him 
before. ... I didn’t used to eat no lunch in the playing season except when I 
knotted I was not going to work. ... I guess the meals has cost me all to¬ 
gether about $1.50, and I have eat very little myself. . . . 

I was willing to tell her all about them two poor girls. . . . They must not 
be no mistake about who is the boss in my house. Some men lets their wife 
run all over them. . . . Allen has went to a college foot-ball game. One of 
the reporters give him a pass. . . . He called up and said he hadn’t only the 
one pass, but he was not hurting my feelings none. . . . The flat across the 
hall from this here one is for rent. ... If we should of houghten furniture it 
would cost us in the neighborhood of $100, even without no piano. ... I con¬ 
sider myself lucky to of found out about this before it was too late and some¬ 
body else had of gotten the tip. ... It will always be ourn, even when we 
move away. . . . Maybe you could of did better if you had of went at it in a 
different way. . . . Both her and you is welcome at my house. ... I never 
seen so much wine drank in my life. . . . 

Here are specimens to fit into most of Charters’ categories—verbs 
confused as to tense, pronouns confused as to case, double and even 
triple negatives, nouns and verbs disagreeing in number, have soft¬ 
ened to of, n marking the possessive instead of s, like used in place 
of as, and the personal pronoun substituted for the demonstrative 
adjective. A study of the whole story would probably unearth all 
the remaining errors noted in Kansas City. Lardner’s baseball 
player, though he has pen in hand and is on his guard, and is thus 

70 You Know Me Al; New York, 1916. 

“ Saturday Evening Post, July 11, 1914. 


THE COMMON SPEECH 


277 


very careful to write would not instead of wouldn’t and even am not 
instead of ain t } offers a comprehensive and highly instructive 
panorama of popular speech habits. To him the forms of the sub¬ 
junctive mood have no existence, and will and shall are identical, and 
adjectives and adverbs are indistinguishable, and the objective case 
is merely a variorum form of the nominative. His past tense is, more 
often than not, the orthodox present tense. All fine distinctions 
are obliterated in his speech. He uses invariably the word that 
is simplest, the grammatical form that is handiest. And so he 
moves toward the philological millennium dreamed of by George 
T. Lanigan, when “the singular verb shall lie down with the plural 
noun, and a little conjunction shall lead them.” 

Lardner, as I say, is a very accurate observer. More, despite the 
grotesqueness of the fables that he uses as skeletons for his reports, 
he is a man of sound philological knowledge, and approaches his 
business quite seriously. As yet the academic critics have failed 
to discover him, but soon or late such things as “The Busher’s Honey¬ 
moon” are bound to find a secure place in the new literature of the 
United States. His influence, indeed, is already considerable, and 
one sees it plainly in such things as Sinclair Lewis’ “Main Street.” 22 
Much of the dialogue in “Main Street” is in vulgar American, and 
Mr. Lewis reports it very accurately. Other writers of fiction turn 
to the same gorgeous and glowing speech; it even penetrates to more 
or less serious writing. For example, in a recent treatise on angling 
by an eminent American authority I find such sentences as “You 
gotta give him credit for being on the job” and “For an accom¬ 
modating cuss we gotta tip the kelly to the wall-eyed pike.” 23 
Finally, there are the experiments in verse by John V. A. 
Weaver 24 —still a bit uncertain, but perhaps showing the way to a 
new American poetry of tomorrow. 

“New York, 1920. 

23 Fishing, Tackle and Kits, by Dixie Carroll, editor of The National Sports¬ 
man; Cincinnati, 1919. 

24 See Appendix II; also, the end of the chapter on The Future of the Lan¬ 
guage. 


278 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


3. 

The Verb 

A study of the materials amassed by Charters and Lardner, if 
it be reinforced by observation of what is heard on the streets every 
day, will show that the chief grammatical peculiarities of spoken 
American lie among the verbs and pronouns. The nouns in common 
use, in the overwhelming main, are quite sound in form. Very 
often, of course, they do not belong to the vocabulary of English, but 
they at least belong to the vocabulary of American: the proletariat, 
setting aside transient slang, calls things by their proper names, 
and pronounces those names more or less correctly. The adjectives, 
too, are treated rather politely, and the adverbs, though commonly 
transformed into the forms of their corresponding adjectives, are 
not further mutilated. But the verbs and pronouns undergo changes 
which set off the common speech very sharply from both correct 
English and correct American. Their grammatical relationships are 
thoroughly overhauled and sometimes they are radically modified in 
form. 

This process is natural and inevitable, for it is among the verbs 
and pronouns, as we have seen, that the only remaining grammatical 
inflections in English, at least of any force or consequence, are to 
be found, and so they must bear the chief pressure of the influences 
that have been warring upon all inflections since the earliest days. 
The primitive Indo-European language, it is probable, had eight cases 
of the noun; the oldest known Teutonic dialect reduced them to 
six; in Anglo-Saxon they fell to four, with a weak and moribund 
instrumental hanging in the air; in Middle English the dative and 
accusative began to decay; in Modern English they have disappeared 
altogether, save as ghosts to haunt grammarians. But we still have 
two plainly defined conjugations of the verb, and we still inflect it 
for number, and, in part, at least, for person. And we yet retain 
an objective case of the pronoun, and inflect it for person, number 
and gender. 

Some of the more familiar conjugations of verbs in the American 
common speech, as recorded by Charters or Lardner or derived 
from my own collectanea, are here set down: 



THE COMMON SPEECH 


279 


Present 

Preterite 

Perfect Participle 

Am 

was 

bin (or ben) 25 

Attack 

attackted 

attackted 

(Be) “ 

was 

bin (or ben) 28 

Beat 

beaten 

beat 

Become 27 

become 

became 

Begin 

begun 

began 

Bend 

bent 

bent 

Bet 

bet 

bet 

Bind 

bound 

bound 

Bite 

bitten 

bit 

Bleed 

bled 

bled 

Blow 

blowed (or blew) 

blowed (or blew) 

Break 

broken 

broke 

Bring 

brought (or brung, or brung 
brang) 

Broke (passive) 

broke 

broke 

Build 

built 

built 

Burn 

Burst 29 

burnt 28 

burnt 

Bust 

busted 

busted 

Buy 

bought (or bough ten) 

bought (or boughten) 

Can 30 

could 

could 

Catch 

caught “ 

caught 

Choose 

chose 

choose 

Climb 

clum 

clum 

Cling (to hold fast) 

clung 

clung 

Cling (to ring) 

clang 

clang 

Come 

come 

came 

Creep 

crep (or crope) 

crep 

Crow 

crowed (or crew) 

crowed 

Cut 

cut 

cut 

Dare 

dared (or dast) 12 

dared 

Deal 

dole 8 * 

dealt 

Dig 

dug 

dug 


25 Bin is the correct American pronunciation. Bean, as we have seen, is 
the English. But I have often found ben, rhyming with pen, in such phrases 
as “I ben there.” 

26 Be, in the subjunctive, is practically extinct. 

"Seldom used. Get is used in the place of it, as in “I am getting old” and 
“he got sick.” 

28 Burned with a distinct d-sound is almost unknown in American. 

29 Not used. Bust has quite displaced it. 

30 A form of can is also used in place of can’t. The t is dropped and the a 
lengthened until it roughly corresponds with that of pan. I frequently hear 
it in “you can(’t) do it.” When can’t ends a sentence the t is usually pro¬ 
nounced clearly. 

21 Botched is heard only in the South, and mainly among negroes. Catch, 
of course, is usually pronounced ketch. Even catcher is ketcher. 

82 Dast is more common in the negative, as in “He dasn’t do it.” 

“ Dole, of course, is supported by the noun. 




280 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


Present 

Preterite 

Perfect Participle 

Dive 

dove* 4 

dived 

Do 

done 

done (or did) 

Drag 

drug 

dragged 

Draw 

drawed 

drawed (or drew) 

Dream 

drempt 

drempt 

Drink 

drank (or drunk) 

drank 

Drive 

drove 

drove 

Drown 

drownded 

drownded 

Eat 

et (or eat) 

ate (or et) 

Fall 

fell (or fallen) 

fell 

Feed 

fed 

fed 

Feel 

felt 

felt 

Fetch 

fetched M 

fetch 

Fight 

fought ** 

fought 

Find 

found 

found 

Fine 

found 

found 

Fling 

flang 

flung 

Flow 

flew 

flowed 

Fly 

flew 

flew 

Forget 

forgot (or forgotten) 

forgotten 

Forsake 

forsaken 

forsook 

Freeze 

frozen (or froze) 

frozen 

Get 

got (or gotten) 

gotten 

Give 

give 

give 

Glide 

glode 33 

glode 

Go 

went 

went 

Grow 

growed 

growed 

Hang 

hung** 

hung 

Have 

had 

had (or hadden) 

Hear 

heerd 

heerd (or heern) 

Heat 

het" 

het 

Heave 

hove 

hove 

Hide 

hidden 

hid 

H’ist u 

h’isted 

h’isted 

Hit 

hit 

hit 


** Dove seems to be making its way into standard American. I constantly 
encounter it in manuscripts. It is used by Amy Lowell in Legends; Boston, 
1921, p. 4. 

38 Fotch is also heard, but it is not general. 

M Fit and fatten, unless my observation errs, are heard only in dialect. Fit 
is archaic English. Cf. Thornton, vol. i, p. 322. 

" Friz is used only humorously. 

** Glode once enjoyed a certain respectability in America. It occurs in the 
Knickerbocker Magazine for April, 1856. 

** Hanged is never heard. 

"diet is incomplete without the addition of up. “He was het up” is always 
heard, not “he was het” 

“ Always so pronounced. 


THE COMMON SPEECH 


281 


Present 

Preterite 

Perfect Participle 

Hold 

helt 

held (or helt) 

Holler 

hollered 

hollered 

Hurt 

hurt 

hurt 

Keep 

kep 

kep 

Kneel 

knelt 

knelt 

Know 

knowed 

knew 

Lay 

laid (or lain) 

laid 

Lead 

led 

led 

Lean 

lent 

lent 

Leap 

lep 

lep 

Learn 

learnt 

learnt 

Lend 

loaned 

loaned 

Lie (to falsify) 

lied 

lied 

Lie (to recline) 

laid (or lain) 

laid 

Light 

lit 

lit 

Loose 48 

Lose 

lost 

lost 

Make 

made 

made 

May 

Mean 

meant 

might’a 

meant 

Meet 

met 

met 

Mow 

mown 

mowed 

Pay 

paid 

paid 

Plead 

pled 

pled 

Prove 

proved (or proven) 

proven 

Put 

put 

put 

Quit 

quit 

quit 

Raise 

raised 

raised 

Read 

read 

read 

Rench 48 

renched 

renched 

Rid 

rid 

rid 

Ride 

ridden 

rode 

Rile 44 

riled 

riled 

Ring 

rung 

rang 

Rise 

riz (or rose) 

riz 

Run 

run 

ran 

Say 

sez 

said 

See 

seen 

saw 

Sell 

sold 

sold 

Send 

sent 

sent 

Set 

set 48 

sat 

Shake 

shaken (or shuck) 

shook 

Shave 

shaved 

shaved 


42 To loose is never used; to unloosen has displaced it. 
“Always used in place of rinse. 

44 Always used in place of roil. 

48 Sot is heard as a localism only. 





282 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


Present 

Preterite 

Perfect Participle 

Shed 

shed 

shed 

Shine (to polish) 

shined 

shined 

Shoe 

shoed 

shoed 

Shoot 

shot 

shot 

Show 

shown 

showed 

Sing 

sung 

sang 

Sink 

sunk 

sank 

Sit 4 * 

Skin 

skun 

skun 

Sleep 

slep 

slep 

Slide 

slid 

slid 

Sling 

slang 

slung 

Slit 

slitted 

slitted 

Smell 

smelt 

smelt 

Sneak 

snuck 

snuck 

Speed 

speeded 

speeded 

Spell 

spelt 

spelt 

Spill 

spilt 

spilt 

Spin 

span 

span 

Spit 

spit 

spit 

Spoil 

spoilt 

spoilt 

Spring 

sprung 

sprang 

Steal 

stole 

stole 

Sting 

stang 

stung 

Stink 

stank 

stunk 

Strike 

struck 

struck 

Swear 

swore 

swore 

Sweep 

swep 

swep 

Swell 

swole (or swelled) 

swollen 

Swim 

swum 

swam 

Swing 

swang 

swung 

Take 

taken 

took 

Teach 

taught 

taught 

Tear 

tore 

torn 

Tell 

tole 

tole 

Thin 41 

Think 

thought 48 

thought 

Thrive 

throve 

throve 

Throw 

throwed 

threw 

Tread 

tread 

tread 

Unloosen 

unloosened 

unloosened 

Wake 

woke 

woken 

Wear 

wore 

wore 

Weep 

wep 

wep 


“See set, which is used almost invariably in place of sit. 

47 To thin is never used; to thinnen takes its place. 

“Thunk is never used seriously; it always shows humorous intent. 






THE COMMON SPEECH 


283 


Present 

Wet 

Win 

Wind 

Wish (wisht) 

Wring 

Write 


Preterite 

wet 

won (or wan) ** 

wound 

wisht 

wrung 

written 


Perfeot Partioiple 
wet 

won (or wan) 

wound 

wisht 

wrang 

wrote 


A glance at these conjugations is sufficient to show several gen¬ 
eral tendencies, some of them going back, in their essence, to the 
earliest days of the English language. The most obvious is that 
leading to the transfer of verbs from the so-called strong conjuga¬ 
tion to the weak—a change already in operation before the Norman 
Conquest, and very marked during the Middle English period. 
Chaucer used grovoed for grew in the prologue to “The Wife of 
Bath’s Tale,” and rised for rose and smited for smote are in John 
Purvey’s edition of the Bible, circa 1385. Many of these trans¬ 
formations were afterward abandoned, but a large number survived, 
for example, climbed for clomb as a preterite of to climb, and melted 
for molt as the preterite of to melt. Others showed themselves dur¬ 
ing the early part of the Modern English period. Corned as the 
perfect participle of to come and digged as the preterite of to dig 
are both in Shakespeare, and the latter is also in Milton and in the 
Authorized Version of the Bible. This tendency went furthest, 
of course, in the vulgar speech, and it has been embalmed in the 
English dialects. I seen and I lcnowed, for example, are common 
to many of them. But during the seventeenth century it seems to 
have been arrested, and even to have given way to a contrary ten¬ 
dency—that is, toward strong conjugations. The English of Ire¬ 
land, which preserves many seventeenth century forms, shows this 
plainly. Ped for paid, gather for gathered, and ruz for raised are 
still in use there, and Joyce says flatly that the Irish, “retaining the 
old English custom ( i . e., the custom of the period of Cromwell’s 
invasion, circa 1650), have a leaning toward the strong inflection.” 50 
Certain verb forms of the American colonial period, now reduced 
to the estate of localisms, are also probably survivors of the seven¬ 
teenth century. 

"Lardner tells me that he believes win is supplanting both won and wan in 
the past tense. 

“ English As We Speak It in Ireland, p. 77. 


284 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


“The three great causes of change in language,” says Sayce, “may 
be briefly described as (1) imitation or analogy, (2) a wish to be 
clear and emphatic, and (3) laziness. Indeed, if we choose to go 
deep enough we might reduce all three causes to the general one 
of laziness, since it is easier to imitate than to say something new.” 51 
This tendency to take well-worn paths, paradoxically enough, is 
responsible both for the transfer of verbs from the strong to the 
weak declension, and for the transfer of certain others from the 
weak to the strong. A verb in everyday use tends almost inevitably 
to pull less familiar verbs with it, whether it be strong or weak. 
Thus fed as the preterite of to feed and led as the preterite of to lead 
paved the way for pled as the preterite of to plead, and rode as 
plainly performed the same office for glode, and rung for brung, and 
drove for dove and hove, and stole for dole, and won for slcun. 
Moreover, a familiar verb, itself acquiring a faulty inflection, may 
fasten a similar inflection upon another verb of like sound. Thus 
het, as the preterite of to heat, no doubt owes its existence to the 
example of et, the vulgar preterite of to eat . 52 So far the irregular 
verbs. The same combination of laziness and imitativeness works 
toward the regularization of certain verbs that are historically 
irregular. In addition, of course, there is the fact that regulariza¬ 
tion is itself intrinsically simplification—that it makes the language 
easier. One sees the antagonistic pull of the two influences in the 
case of verbs ending in -ow. The analogy of knew suggests snew as 
the preterite of to snow, and it is sometimes encountered in the 
American vulgate. But the analogy of snowed also suggests 
knowed, and the superior regularity of the form is enough to over¬ 
come the greater influence of knew as a more familiar word than 
snowed. Thus snew grows rare and is in decay, but knowed shows 
vigor, and so do growed and throwed. The substitution of heerd 
for heard also presents a case of logic and convenience supporting 

M The Science of Language, vol. i, p. 166. 

“The use of eat as its own preterite was formerly sound in English and 
still survives more or less. I find it on p. 24 of On Human Bondage, by 
W. Somerset Maugham; New York, 1915. A correspondent informs me that 
it occurs in Much Ado About Nothing, act iv, sc. i, in A Midsummer Night’s 
Dream, act ii, sc. ii, in As You Like It, act i, sc. iii, in The Taming of the 
Shrew, act iv, sc. i, in Macbeth, act ii, sc. iv, and in King Lear, act i, sc. iv. 
How the preterite was pronounced in Shakespeare’s day I do not know. 


THE COMMON SPEECH 


285 


analogy. The form is suggested by steered, feared and cheered, 
but its main advantage lies in the fact that it gets rid of a vowel 
change, always an impediment to easy speech. Here, as in the 
contrary direction, one barbarism breeds another. Thus taken, 
as the preterite of to take, has undoubtedly helped to make preterites 
of two other perfects, shaken and forsaken. 

But in the presence of two exactly contrary tendencies, the one 
in accordance with the general movement of the language since the 
Norman Conquest and the other opposed to it, it is unsafe, of 
course, to attempt any very positive generalizations. All one may 
exhibit with safety is a general habit of treating the verb con¬ 
veniently. Now and then, disregarding grammatical tendencies, 
it is possible to discern what appear to be logical causes for verb 
phenomena. That lit is preferred to lighted and hung to hanged is 
probably the result of an aversion to fine distinctions, and perhaps, 
more fundamentally, to the passive. Again, the use of found as the 
preterite of to fine is obviously due to an ignorant confusion of fine 
and find, due to the wearing off of -d in find, and that of lit as the 
preterite of to alight to a confusion of alight and light. Yet again, 
the use of tread as its own preterite in place of trod is probably the 
consequence of a vague feeling that a verb ending with d is already 
of preterite form. Shed exhibits the same process. Both are given 
a logical standing by such preterites as bled, fed, led, read, dead and 
spread. But here, once more, it is hazardous to lay down laws, for 
shredded, headed, dreaded, threaded and breaded at once come to 
mind. In other cases it is still more difficult to account for preterites 
in common use. In my first edition I called attention to the cases 
of drug, clum and friz. On this point, a correspondent has since 
sent me the following interesting observations: 

True enough, these forms may not adhere closely to the rules of ahlaut; 
but are they not born of the spirit of ablaut which pervades the English verb? 
Thus: the most obvious form of strong verb is 


ring 

rang 

rung 

stink 

stank 

stunk 

begin 

began 

begun 

sing 

sang 

sung 


286 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


spin 

span 63 

spun 



speak 

spake 

spoke 84 



spit 

spat 

spot 



(I feel in my bones that spot is a 

derivative of spit. Spot is 

the name 

of 

the mark made by spitting, 
human acts.) 

which is 

obviously one of the most 

primary 

of 

swim 

swam 

swum 



spring 

sprang 

sprung 




I imagine that more irregular verbs conform to this one succession than to 
any one of the others. But all of them, including this one, have been inter¬ 
rupted and obscured by the collision of such independent words as think and 
thank, i.e., 

think (thank) (thunk) 

Thank is forced out to avoid collision with 

thank thanked thanked 

Now, if freeze had been regularly irregular, it would have been 
friz fraz frozen 

but the present being freeze instead of friz, the procession would normally be 
freeze frez frozen 

I don’t know whether I have made my idea plain: it is not based on visible 
law so much as on innate feeling. Its validity depends on whether, when I 
state it to you, you too feel instinctively that amid the clash of strong tenses 
your own mind would select these forms, in obedience to an overmastering 
impulse of euphony. The proper jury to render the verdict would be one of 
poets. I do not suppose anyone will deny that a man reacts to the genius of 
his mother tongue, without knowing why. There are, and must have been, 
even deeper depths of reaction than these strong verbs, to account for the 
choice of vowel sounds in different words, which process in early ages was 
entirely unconscious. 

This, of course, is only to intimate that there must have been “method in 
the madness” of friz. As for clrnn, it seems to me that it is visibly clomb 
descended to the next lower level, and then denuded of its final b, probably 
by analogy with thumb. Indeed, it is difficult to pronounce that b unless one 
say s clommmb, thurrwvmb! “ And will you not agree with me that these are 
inevitable: 


(drig) 

drag 

drog (descended to 



drug) 

drag 

(drog) 

drug 

(dreeg) 

(dreg) 

(droge) 

(drogg) 

(drug) 

(droog) 


53 Span, of course, is now archaic in standard English, but it survives in 
vulgar American and in many other English dialects. 

M Spoke replaces the earlier spak. 

55 d Ins b after m has been mute in English for centuries. 


THE COMMON SPEECH 


287 


i.e., it scarcely matters what vowel marked the present tense of dr-g, for with any 
vowel this combination of consonants demands, in any English-speaking mind 
which is functioning naturally, and not biased by conscious thought, that its 
past participle be something very close to drug. 

Some of the verbs of the vulgate show the end and products of 
language movements that go back to the Anglo-Saxon period, and 
even beyond. There is, for example, the disappearance of the final t 
in such words as crep, step, lep, swep and wep. Most of these, in 
Anglo-Saxon, were strong verbs. The preterite of to sleep ( slcepan ), 
for example, was step, and of to weep was weop. But in the course 
of time both to sleep and to weep acquired weak preterite end¬ 
ings, the first becoming slcepte and the second wepte. This weak 
conjugation was itself degenerated. Originally, the inflectional 
su ffix had been -de or -ede and in some cases -ode, and the vowels 
were always pronounced. The wearing down process that set in in 
the twelfth century disposed of the final e, hut in certain words the 
other vowel survived for a good while, and we still observe it in 
such archaisms as learned and beloved. Finally, however, it be¬ 
came silent in other preterites, and loved, for example, began to be 
pronounced (and often written) as a word of one syllable: lov’d. 5 ® 
This final d-sound now fell upon difficulties of its own. After cer¬ 
tain consonants it was hard to pronounce clearly, and so the sonant 
was changed into the easier surd, and such words as pushed and 
clipped became, in ordinary conversation, pusht and dipt. In other 
verbs, the £-sound had come in long before, with the degenerated 
weak ending, and when the final e was dropped their stem vowels 
tended to change. Thus arose such forms as slept. In vulgar 
American another step is taken, and the suffix is dropped altogether. 
Thus, by a circuitous route, verbs originally strong, and for many 
centuries hovering between thq two conjugations, have eventually 
become strong again. 

The case of Kelt is probably an example of change by false analogy. 

60 The last stand of the distinct -ed was made in Addison’s day. He was in 
favor of retaining it, and in the Spectator for Aug. 4, 1711, he protested against 
obliterating the syllable in the termination “of our praeter perfect tense, as in 
these words, drown’d, walk’d, arriv’d, for drowned, walked, arrived, which has 
very much disfigured the tongue, and turned a tenth part of our smoothest 
words into so many clusters of consonants.” 


288 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


During the thirteenth century, according to Sweet , 57 “d was changed 
to t in the weak preterites of verbs (ending) in rd, Id, nd Before 
that time the preterite of sende {send) had been sende; now it be¬ 
came sente. It survives in our modern sent, and the same process 
is also revealed in built, girt, lent, rent and bent. The popular 
speech, disregarding the fact that to hold is a strong verb, arrives 
at helt by imitation . 58 In the case of tole, which I almost always 
hear in place of told, there is a leaping of steps. The d is got rid 
of by assimilation with l and without any transitional use of t. 
So also, perhaps, in svoole, which is fast displacing swelled. 
Attackted and drownded seem to be examples of an effort to 
dispose of harsh combinations by a contrary process. Both 
are very old in English. Boughten and dreampt present greater 
difficulties. Lounsbury says that boughten probably originated 
in the Northern {i. e.. Lowland Scotch) dialect of English, 
“which . . . inclined to retain the full form of the past parti¬ 
ciple,” and even to add its termination “to words to which it did 
not properly belong.” 69 The p-sound in dreampt follows a phonetic 
law that is also seen in warm(p)th, com{p)fort, and some(p)thing, 
and that has actually inserted a p in Thompson (—Toms son). 

The general tendency toward regularization is well exhibited by 
the new verbs that come into the language constantly. Practically 
all of them show the weak conjugation, for example, to phone, to 
bluff, to rubber-neck, to ante, to bunt, to wireless, to insurge and to 
loop-the-loop. Even when a compound has as its last member a 
verb ordinarily strong, it remains weak itself. Thus the preterite 
of to joy-ride is not joy-rode, nor even joy-ridden, but joy-rided. 
And thus bust, from burst, is regular and its preterite is busted, 
though burst is irregular and its preterite is the verb itself unchanged. 
The same tendency toward regularity is shown by the verbs of the 
kneelrclsiss. They are strong in English, but tend to become weak 
in colloquial American. Thus the preterite of to kneel, despite the 
example of to sleep and its analogues, is not kneV, nor even knelt, 
but kneeled. I have even heard feeled as the preterite of to feel, as 

67 A New English Grammar, pt. i, p. 380. 

“ The noun is commonly made holt, as in, “I got a -holt of it.” 

59 History of the English Language, p. 398. 


THE COMMON SPEECH 


289 


in “I feeled my way,” though here felt still persists. To spread also 
tends to become weak, as in “he spreaded a piece of bread.” An d 
to peep remains so, despite the example of to leap. The confusion 
between the inflections of to lie and those of to lay extends to the 
higher reaches of spoken American, and so does that between lend 
and loan. The proper inflections of to lend are often given to to 
lean, and so leaned becomes lent, as in “I lent on the counter.” In 
the same way to set has almost completely superseded to sit, and the 
preterite of the former, set, is used in place of sat. But the perfect 
participle (which is also the disused preterite) of to sit has sur¬ 
vived, as in “I have sat there.” To speed and to shoe have become 
regular, not only because of the general tendency toward the weak 
conjugation, but also for logical reasons. The prevalence of speed 
contests of various sorts, always to the intense interest of the pro¬ 
letariat, has brought such words as speeder, speeding, speed-mania, 
speed-maniac and speed-limit into daily use, and speeded harmonizes 
with them better than the stronger sped. As for shoed, it merely 
reveals the virtual disappearance of the verb in its passive form. An 
American would never say that his wife was well shod; he would say 
that she wore good shoes. To shoe suggests to him only the shoeing 
of animals, and so, by way of shoeing and horse-shoer, he comes to 
shoed. His misuse of to learn for to teach is common to most of the 
English dialects. More peculiar to his speech is the use of to leave 
for to let. Charters records it in “Washington left them have it,” 
and there are many examples of it in Lardner. Spit, in American, 
has become invariable; the old preterite, spat, has completely dis¬ 
appeared. But slit, which is now invariable in English (though it 
was strong in Old English and had both strong and weak preterites 
in Middle English), has become regular in American, as in “she 
slitted her skirt.” 

In studying the American verb, of course, it is necessary to re¬ 
member always that it is in a state of transition, and that in many 
cases the manner of using it is not yet fixed. “The histoiy of lan¬ 
guage,” says Lounsbury, “when looked at from the purely gram¬ 
matical point of view, is little else than the history of corruptions.” 
What we have before us is a series of corruptions in active process, 
and while some of them have gone very far, others are just begin- 



290 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


ning. Thus it is not uncommon to find corrupt forms side by side 
with orthodox forms, or even two corrupt forms battling with each 
other. Lardner, in the case of to throw, hears “if he had throw ed” ; 
my own observation is that threw is more often used in that situa¬ 
tion. Again, he uses “the rottenest I ever seen gave”; my own 
belief is that give is far more commonly used. The conjugation of 
to give, however, is yet very uncertain, and so Lardner may report 
accurately. I have heard “I given” and “I would of gave,” but “I 
give” seems to be prevailing, and “I would of give” with- it, thus 
reducing to give to one invariable form, like those of to cut, to hit, 
to put, to cost, to hurt and to spit. My table of verbs shows various 
other uncertainties and confusions. The preterite of to hear is 
heerd; the perfect may be either heerd or lieern. That of to do 
may be either done or did, with the former apparently prevailing; 
that of to draw is drew if the verb indicates to attract or to abstract 
and drawed if it indicates to draw with a pencil. Similarly, the 
preterite of to bfow inay be either blowed or blew, and that of to 
drink oscillates between drank and drunk, and that of to fall is still 
usually fell, though fallen has appeared, and that of to shake may 
be either shaken or shuck. The conjugation of to. win is yet far from 
fixed. The correct English preterite, won, is still in use, but against 
it are arrayed wan and winned, and Lardner, as I have noted, be¬ 
lieves that the plain form of the present is ousting all of them. 
Wan seems to show some kinship, by ignorant analogy, with ran 
and began. It is often used as the perfect participle, as in “I have 
wan $4.” This uncertainty shows itself in many of the communi¬ 
cations that I have received since my first edition was published. 
Practically every one of my conjugations has been questioned by 
at least one correspondent; nevertheless, the weight of observation 
has supported all save a few of them, and I have made no more 
than half a dozen changes. 

The misuse of the perfect participle for the preterite, now almost 
the invariable rule in vulgar American, is common to many other 
dialects of English, and seems to be a symptom of a general break¬ 
down of the perfect tenses. The change has been going on for a long 
time, and in American, the most vigorous and advanced of all the 
dialects of the language, it is particularly well marked. Even in the 





THE COMMON SPEECH 


291 


most pretentious written American it shows itself. The English, in 
their writing, still use the future perfect, albeit somewhat labori¬ 
ously and self-consciously, but in America it has virtually disap¬ 
peared: one often reads whole books without encountering a single 
example of it. Even the present perfect and past perfect seem to 
be instinctively avoided. The Englishman says “I have dined,” 
but the Aanerican says “I am through dinner”; the Englishman says 
“I had slept,” but the American often says “I was done sleeping.” 
Thus the perfect tenses are forsaken for the simple present and the 
past. In the vulgate a further step is taken, and “I have been 
there” becomes “I been there.” 60 Even in such phrases as “he hasn’t 
been here,” ain’t (= am not ) is commonly substituted for have not, 
thus giving the present perfect a flavor of the simple present. The 
step from “I have taken” to “I taken” was therefore neither diffi¬ 
cult nor unnatural, and once it had been made the resulting locu¬ 
tion was supported by the greater apparent regularity of its verb. 
Moreover, this perfect participle, thus put in place of the preterite, 
was further reinforced by the fact that it was the adjectival form 
of the verb, and hence collaterally familiar. Finally, it was also 
the authentic preterite in the passive voice, and although this influ¬ 
ence, in view of the decay of the passive, may not have been of 
much consequence, nevertheless it is not to be dismissed as of no 
consequence, at all. 

The contrary substitution of the preterite for the perfect par¬ 
ticiple, as in “I have went” and “he has did” apparently has a 
double influence behind it. In the first place, there is the effect of 
the confused and blundering effort, by an ignorant and unanalytical 
speaker, to give the perfect some grammatical differentiation when 
he finds himself getting into it—an excursion not infrequently 
made necessary by logical exigencies, despite his inclination to keep 
out. The nearest indicator at hand is the disused preterite, and so 
it is put to use. Sometimes a sense of its uncouthness seems to 
linger, and there is a tendency to give it an erk-suffix, thus bringing 

"°A correspondent writes: “The change from T have been there’ to ‘I been 
there’ is a purely phonetic one. The have, by virtue of its lack of sentence 
stress, is reduced to a simple v, and then vanishes altogether. A parallel loss 
of the auxiliary took place in literary German, although there the loss was 
not supported by a phonetic process, as in English.” 



292 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


it into greater harmony with its tense. I find that boughten, just 
discussed, is used much oftener in the perfect than in the simple 
past tense; 61 for the latter bought usually suffices. The quick ear 
of Lardner detects various other coinages of the same sort, among 
them tooken, as in “little A1 might of tooken sick” Hadden is 
also met with, as in “I would of hadden.” But the majority of 
preterites remain unchanged. Lardner’s baseball player never writes 
“I have written” or “I have wroten,” but always “I have wrote.” 
And in the same way he always writes, “I have did, ate, went, drank, 
rode, ran, saw, sang, woke and stole.” Sometimes the simple form 
of the verb persists through all tenses. This is usually the case, for 
example, with to give. I have noted “I give” both as present and 
as preterite, and “I have give,” and even “I had give.” But even 
here “I have gave” offers rivalry to “I have give,” and usage is not 
settled. So, too, with to come. “I have come” and “I have came” 
seem to be almost equally favored, with the former supported by 
pedagogical admonition and the latter by the spirit of the language. 

Whatever the true cause of the substitution of the preterite for 
the perfect participle, 62 it seems to be a tendency inherent in English 
and during the age of Elizabeth it showed itself even in the most 
formal speech. An examination of any play of Shakespeare’s will 
show many such forms as “I have wrote,” “I am mistook” and “he 
has rode.” In several cases this transfer for the preterite has sur¬ 
vived. “I have stood,” for example, is now perfectly correct Eng¬ 
lish, but before 1550 the form was “I have stonden.” To hold and 
to sit belong to the same class; their original perfect participles were 
not held and sat, but holden and sitten. These survived the move¬ 
ment toward the formalization of the language which began with 


61 And still more often as an adjective, as in “it was a boughten dress.” 

“A philological correspondent writes: “The true cause of the confusion of 
preterite and past participle lies in the nature of the inherited inflexions. In 
the weak verbs the two forms early became identical. In the strong verbs 
the preterite plural was often identical with the participle (the preterite 
singular having a special form). When the same form came to be used 
throughout the preterite it might be the singular form or the plural form. 
If the latter won in the competition, this meant the loss of any distinction 
between preterite and participle. If the preterite singular triumphed, the 
plural might still survive as a vulgar form. Now since both forms might be 
preterite in meaning, and one of them in addition might be participial, it is 
easy to see ‘how the other form, by a natural parallelism, might likewise 
acquire a participial function.” 


THE COMMON SPEECH 


293 


the eighteenth century, but scores of other such misplaced preterites 
were driven out. One of the last to go was wrote, which persisted 
until near the end of the century. Paradoxically enough, the very 
purists who performed the purging showed a preference for got 
(though not forgot), and it survives in correct English today in the 
preterit&present form, as in “I have got” whereas in American, 
both vulgar and polite, the elder and more regular gotten is often 
used. In the polite speech gotten indicates a distinction between a 
completed action and a continuing action—between obtaining and 
possessing. “I have gotten what I came for” is correct, and so is 
“I have got a house.” In the vulgar speech much the same distinc¬ 
tion exists, but the perfect becomes a sort of simple tense by the 
elision of have. Thus the two sentences change to “I gotten what I 
come for” and “I got a house,” the latter being understood, not as 
past, but as present. 63 

In “I have got a house” got is historically a sort of auxiliary of 
have, and in colloquial American, as we have seen in the examples 
just given, the auxiliary has obliterated the verb. To have, as an 
auxiliary, probably because of its intimate relationship with the 
perfect tenses, is under heavy pressure, and promises to disappear 
from the situations in which it is still used. I have heard was 
used in place of it, as in “before the Elks was come here.” 64 Some¬ 
times it is confused ignorantly with a distinct of, as in “she would of 
drove,” and “I would of gave.” 65 More often it is shaded to a sort 
of particle, attached to the verb as an inflection, as in “he would 
'a tole you,” and “who could 'a took it?” But this is not all. 
Having degenerated to such forms, it is now employed as a sort of 
auxiliary to itself, in the subjunctive, as in “if you had of went,” 
“if it had of been hard,” and “if I had of had.” 66 I have encoun- 

83 Got , of course, also has a compulsive sense, as in “I have got to go.” It 
is also used in the general sense of becoming, as in “I got scared.” 

'* Remark of a policeman talking to another. What he actually said was 
“before the Elks was &m ’ere." Come and here were one word, approximately 
omear. The context showed that he meant to use the past perfect tense. 

86 The following curious examples, sent to me by Dr. Morris Fishbein of the 
Journal of the American Medical Association, is from a letter received by a 
California physician: “If I had of waited a day longer before I wrote to you I 
would not of had to write that letter to you.” Here the author plainly mis¬ 
takes have for of. 

88 These examples are from Lardner’s story, A New Busher Breaks In, in 
You Know Me Al, pp. 122 ef seq. 


294 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


tered some rather astonishing examples of this doubling of the 
auxiliary. One appears in “I wouldn’t had 'a went”; another in 
“I’d ’a had ’a saved more money.” Here, however, the a may belong 
partly to had and partly to the verb; such forms as a-going are very 
common in American. But in the other cases, and in such forms as 
“I had ’a wanted,” it clearly belongs to had. Meanwhile, to have , 
ceasing to be an auxiliary, becomes a general verb indicating com¬ 
pulsion. Here it promises to displace must. The American seldom 
says “I must go”; he almost invariably says “I have to go,” 67 or 
“I have got to go,” in which last case, as we have seen, got is the 
auxiliary. 

The most common inflections of the verb for mode and voice are 
shown in the following paradigm of to bite: 


ACTIVE VOICE 
Indicative Mode 


Present 

Present Perfect 
Past 

I bite Past Perfect 

I have bit Future 

I bitten Future Perfect 

I had of bit 

I will bite 
(wanting) 

Present 

Past 

Subjunctive Mode 

If I bite Past Perfect 

If I bitten 

If I had of bit 


Potential Mode 


Present 

Present Perfect 

I can bite Past 

(wanting) Past Perfect 

I could bite 

I could of bit 

Future 

Imperative (or Optative) Mode 

I shall (or will) 



bite 


(wanting) 


Infinitive Mode 


Present 

Present Perfect 
Past 


Present 

Past 


PASSIVE VOICE 
Indicative Mode 
I am bit Past Perfect 

I been bit Future 

I was bit Future Perfeot 

Subjunctive Mode 
If I am bit Past Perfect 

If I was bit 


I bad been bit 
I will be bit 
(wanting) 

If I had of been 
bit 


eT Almost always pronounced haf to, or, in the past tense, hat to. Sometimes 
hat to undergoes composition and the d is restored; it then becomes hadda. 
Haf to similarly changes to liafta. 


THE COMMON SPEECH 


295 


Potential Mode 

Present I can be bit Past I could be bit 

Present Perfect (wanting) Past Perfect I could of been bit 

Imperative Mode 

(wanting) 

Infinitive Mode 

(wanting) 

A study of this paradigm reveals several plain tendencies. One 
has just been discussed: the addition of a degenerated form of have 
to the preterite of the auxiliary, and its use in place of the auxiliary 
itself. Another is the use of will instead of shall in the first per¬ 
son future. Shall is confined to a sort of optative, indicating much 
more than mere intention, and even here it is yielding to will. Yet 
another is the consistent use of the transferred preterite in the 
passive. Here the rule in correct English is followed faithfully, 
though the perfect participle employed is not the English participle. 
“I am broke” is a good example. Finally, there is the substitution 
of was for were and of am for be in the past and present of the 
subjunctive. In this last case American is in accord with the gen¬ 
eral movement of English, though somewhat more advanced. Be, 
in the Shakespearean form of “where be thy brothers?” was ex¬ 
pelled from the present indicative two hundred years ago, and sur¬ 
vives today only in dialect. And as it thus yielded to are in the 
indicative, it now seems destined to yield to am and is in the sub¬ 
junctive. It remains, of course, in the future indicative: “I will 
be.” In American its conjugation coalesces with that of am in 
the following manner: 

Present I am 

Present Perfect I bin (or ben) 

Past I was 

And in the subjunctive: 

Present If I am 

Past If I was 

All signs of the subjunctive, indeed, seem to be disappearing 
from vulgar American. One never hears “if I were you,” but 
always “if I was you”; (f was you going to the dance?” is a very 
common form. In the third person the -s is not dropped from the 


Past Perfect 
Future 

Future Perfect 
Past Perfect 


I had of ben 
I will be 
(wanting) 

If I had of ben 



296 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


verb. One bears, not “if she go,” but always “if she goes ” “If be 
be the man” is never beard; it is always “if be is.” Such a sentence 
as “Had I wished her, I bad bad her” would be unintelligible to 
most Americans; even “I bad rather” is fast disappearing. This 
war upon the forms of the subjunctive, of course, extends to the 
most formal English. “In Old English,” says Bradley , 68 “the sub¬ 
junctive played as important a part as in modern German, and was 
used in much the same way. Its inflection differed in several re¬ 
spects from that of the indicative. But the only formal trace of 
the old subjunctive still remaining, except the use of be and were, 
is the omission of the final s in the third person singular. And 
even this is rapidly dropping out of use. . . . Perhaps in another 
generation the subjunctive forms will have ceased to exist except 
in the single instance of were, which serves a useful function, al¬ 
though we manage to dispense with a corresponding form in other 
verbs.” Here, as elsewhere, unlettered American usage simply 
proceeds in advance of the general movement. Be and the omitted a 
are already dispensed with, and even were has been discarded. 

In the same way the distinction between will and shall, preserved 
in correct English but already breaking down in the most correct 
American, has been lost entirely in the American common speech. 
Will has displaced shall completely, save in the imperative. This 
preference extends to the inflections of both. Sha’n’t is very seldom 
heard; almost always wont is used instead. As for should, it is 
displaced by ought to (degenerated to oughter or ought’a), and in 
its negative form by hadn’t ought’a,, as in “he hadn’t oughter said 
that,” reported by Charters. Lardner gives various redundant com¬ 
binations of should and ought, as in “I don’t feel as if I should ought 
to leave” and “they should not ought to of had.” I have encoun¬ 
tered the same form, but I don’t think it is as common as the simple 
ought’a forms . 69 In the main, should is avoided, sometimes at con¬ 
siderable pains. Often its place is taken by the more positive don’t. 
Thus “I don’t mind” is used instead of “I shouldn’t mind.” Don’t 
has also completely displaced doesn’t, which is very seldom heard. 

“The Making of English, p. 53. 

“ In the negative, ought not has degenerated to oughten, as in “you oughten 
do that.” 


THE COMMON SPEECH 


297 


a He don't" and “she don't" are practically universal. In the 
same way ain't has displaced is not, am not, isn't and aren't, and 
even have not and haven't. One recalls a famous speech in a naval 
melodrama of twenty years ago: “We ain't got no manners, but 
we can fight like hell.” Such forms as “he ain't here,” “I ain't the 
man/’ “ain't it the truth ?”, “you been there, ain't you ?”, “you ain't 
drank much,” “them ain't what I want” and “I ain't heerd of it” 
are common. 

This extensive use of ain't, of course, is merely a single symptom 
of a general disregard of number, obvious throughout the verbs, and 
also among the pronouns, as we shall see. Charters gives many ex¬ 
amples, among them, “how is Uncle Wallace and Aunt Clara?”, “you 
was,” “there is six” and the incomparable “it ain't right to say, ‘He 
ain't here today.’ ” In Lardner there are many more, for instance, 
“them Giants is not such rotten hitters, is they ?”, “the people has 
all wanted to shake hands with Matthewson and I” and “some of 
the men has brung their wife along.” Sez (= says), used as the 
preterite of to say, shows the same confusion. One observes it again 
in such forms as “then I goes up to him.” Here the decay of 
number helps in what threatens to become a decay of tense. A 
gambler of the humbler sort seldom says “I won $2,” or even “I wan 
$2,” but almost always “I win $2.” And in the same way he says 
“I see him come in,” not “I saw him come in” or “seen him.” Lard¬ 
ner, as we have seen, believes that win is displacing both won, winned 
and wan. Charters’ materials offer other specimens, among them 
“we help distributed the fruit,” “she recognize, hug, and kiss him” 
and “her father ask her if she intended doing what he ask.” Per¬ 
haps the occasional use of eat as the preterite of to eat, as in “I eat 
breakfast as soon as I got up,” is an example of the same flattening 
out of distinctions. Lardner has many specimens, among them “if 
Weaver and them had not of begin kicking” and “they would of 
knock down the fence.” I notice that used, in used to be, is almost 
always reduced to simple use, as in “it use to be the rule,” with the s 
very much like that of hiss. One seldom, if ever, hears a clear d 
at the end. Here, of course, the elision of the d is due primarily to 
assimilation with the t of to —a second example of one form of decay 
aiding another form. But the tenses apparently tend to crumble 


298 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


without help. I frequently hear whole narratives in a sort of debased 
historical present: “I says to him. . . . Then he ups and says. . . . 
I land him one on the ear. . . . He goes down and out, ...” and 
so on. Still under the spell of our disintegrating inflections, we 
are prone to regard the tense inflections of the verb as absolutely 
essential, hut there are plenty of languages that get on without them, 
and even in our own language children and foreigners often reduce 
them to a few simple forms. Some time ago an Italian contractor 
said to me, “I have go there often.” Here one of our few surviving 
inflections was displaced by an analytical device, .and yet the man’s 
meaning was quite clear, and it would be absurd to say that his 
sentence violated the inner spirit of English. That inner spirit, in 
fact, has inclined steadily toward “I have go” for a thousand years. 


4. 

The Pronoun 

The following paradigm shows the inflections of the personal pro¬ 
noun in the American common speech: 

FIRST PERSON 

Common Gender 

Singular Plural 


N ominative 


I 

we 

Possessive 

( Conjoint 

my 

our 


( Absolute 

mine 

ourn 

Objective 


me 

us 


SECOND 

PERSON 



Common Gender 


N ominative 


you 

yous 

Possessive 

j Conjoint 

your 

your 


( Absolute 

yourn 

yourn 

Objective 


you 

yous 


THIRD 

PERSON 



Masculine Gender 


Nominative 


he 

they 

Possessive 

f Conjoint 

his 

their 


\ Absolute 

hisn 

theirn 

Objective 


him 

them 


THE COMMON SPEECH 


299 


Feminine Gender 


N ominative 


she 

they 

Possessive 

fi Conjoint 

her 

their 


1' Absolute 

hern 

theirn 

Objective 

Neuter 

her 

Gender 

them 

N ominative 


it 

they 

Possessive 

( Conjoint 

its 

their 


( Absolute 

its 

theirn 

Objective 


it 

them 


These inflections, as we shall see, are often disregarded in use, 
but nevertheless it is profitable to glance at them as they stand. The 
only variations that they show from standard English are the sub¬ 
stitution of n for s as the distinguishing mark of the absolute form 
of the possessive, and the attempt to differentiate between the logical 
and the merely polite plurals in the second person by adding the 
usual sign of the plural to the former. The use of n in place of s 
is not an American innovation. It is found in many of the dialects 
of English, and is, in fact, historically quite as sound as the use of s. 
In John Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible ( circa 1380) the first sen¬ 
tence of the Sermon on the Mount (Mark v, 3) is made: “Blessed 
be the pore in spirit, for the kyngdam in hevencs is heren ’’ And 
in his version of Luke xxiv, 24, is this: “And some of ouren wentin 
to the grave.” Here heren (or herun) represents, of course, not the 
modem hers, but theirs. In Anglo-Saxon the word was heora, and 
down to Chaucer’s day a modified form of it, here, was still used 
in the possessive plural in place of the modern their, though they 
had already displaced hie in the nominative. 70 But in John Pur- 
vey’s revision of the Wycliffe Bible, made a few years later, hem 
actually occurs in II Kings vii, 6, thus: “Restore thou to hir alle 
things that ben hern” In Anglo-Saxon there had been no distinc¬ 
tion between the conjoint and absolute forms of the possessive pro¬ 
noun ; the simple genitive sufficed for both uses. But with the decay 
of that language the surviving remnants of its grammar began to 

70 Henry Bradley, in The Making of English, pp. 54-5: “In the parts of Eng¬ 
land which were largely inhabited by Danes the native pronouns (i. e., heo, 
hie, heom and heora) were supplanted by the Scandinavian pronouns which are 
represented by the modern she, they, them and their” This substitution, at 
first dialectical, gradually spread to the whole language. 


300 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


be put to service somewhat recklessly, and so there arose a genitive 
inflection of this genitive—a true double inflection. In the North¬ 
ern dialects of English that inflection was made by simply adding s, 
the sign of the possessive. In the Southern dialects the old n-declen- 
sion was applied, and so there arose such forms as minum and 
eowrurn (= mine and yours), from min and eower (= my and 
your)." 1 Meanwhile, the original simple genitive, now become 
youre, also survived, and so the literature of the fourteenth century 
shows the three forms flourishing side by side: youre, youres and 
youren. All of them are in Chaucer. 

Thus, youm, hem, hisn, ourn and theim, whatever their present 
offense to grammarians, are of a genealogy quite as respectable as 
that of yours, hers, his, ours and theirs. Both forms represent a 
doubling of inflections, and hence grammatical debasement. On 
the side of the yours-iovm is the standard usage of the past five 
hundred years, but on the side of the youmriorm there is no little 
force of analogy and logic, as appears on turning to mine and thine. 
In Anglo-Saxon, as we have seen, my was min; in the same way thy 
was thin. During the decadence of the language the final n was 
dropped in both cases before nouns—that is, in the conjoint form 
—but it was retained in the absolute form. This usage survives 
to our own day. One says ({ my book/’ but “the book is mine”; “thy 
faith,” but “I am thine.” 72 Also, one says “no matter,” but “I 
have none.” Without question this retention of the n in these pro¬ 
nouns had something to do with the appearance of the n-declension 
in the treatment of your, her, his and our, and, after their had dis¬ 
placed here in the third person plural, in their. And equally with¬ 
out question it supports the vulgar American usage today. 73 What 
that usage shows is simply the strong popular tendency to make 
language as simple and as regular as possible-—to abolish subtleties 
and exceptions. The difference between “his book” and “the book 
is hisn” is exactly that between my and mine, thy and thine, in 

n Cf. Sweet: A New English Grammar, pt. i, p. 344, § 1096. 

” Before a noun beginning with a vowel thine and mine are commonly sub¬ 
stituted for thy and my, as in ‘‘thine eyes” and “mine infirmity.” But this is 
solely for the sake of euphony. There is no compensatory use of my and thy 
in the absolute. 

™ I am not forgetting, of course, the possible aid of his own, her own, etc. 


THE COMMON SPEECH 


301 


the examples just given. “Perhaps it would have been better/’ says 
Bradley, “if the literary language had accepted hisn, but from some 
cause it did not do so.” 74 

As for the addition of s to you in the nominative and objective 
of the second person plural, it exhibits no more than an effort to 
give clarity to the logical difference between the true plural and 
the mere polite plural. In several other dialects of English the 
same desire has given rise to cognate forms, and there are even 
secondary devices in American. In the South, for example, the 
true plural is commonly indicated by youroll , which, despite a 
Northern belief to the contrary, is never used in the singular by 
any save the most ignorant. You-all, like yous, simply means you- 
jointly as opposed to the you that means thou. 75 Again, there is the 
form observed in “you can all of you go to hell”—another plain effort 
to differentiate between singular and plural. The substitution of 
you for thou goes back to the end of the thirteenth century. It ap¬ 
peared in late Latin and in the other Continental languages as well 
as in English, and at about the same time. In these languages the 
true singular survives alongside the transplanted plural, but Eng¬ 
lish has dropped it entirely, save in its poetical and liturgical forms 
and in a few dialects. It passed out of ordinary polite speech before 
Elizabeth’s day. By that time, indeed, its use had acquired an air 
of the offensive, such as it has today, save between intimates or to 
children, in Germany. Thus, at the trial of Sir Walter Raleigh in 
1603, Sir Edward Coke, then attorney-general, displayed his ani- 

T4 The Making of English, p. 58. 

75 Cf. The Dialect of Southeastern Missouri, by D. S. Crumb, Dialect Notes, 
vol. ii, pt. iv, 1903, p. 337, and You-all as Used in the South, by C. Alphonso 
Smith, Uncle Remus’s Magazine, July, 1907, reprinted in the Kit-Kat (Colum¬ 
bus, O.) Jan., 1920. Dr. Smith says that you-all, as used in the South, differs 
from you all in the ordinary sense of all of you. “When a Southerner,” he says, 
“wishes to convey the ordinary plural sense he puts the accent on all, as does 
everyone else, or he employs the alternative all of you.” In the Southern form, 
with the accent on you, all is the pronoun and you the modifying adjective. 
The difference is illustrated in the sentence: “Children, you-all haven’t done 
what I told you to do; some of you have brought your dictionaries to class, 
but tomorrow I want you all to bring them.” The former is the Southern use; 
the latter is the general. Various theories to account for the locution have 
been brought forward. It has been connected with the French vous autres or 
vous tout , and with the use of all (for already) in the Low German, “Good’n 
morn; wohen wilt ye all?” But Dr. Smith believes that it comes from seven¬ 
teenth century English, and produces much evidence in support of that view. 
His paper is very interesting. 


302 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


mosity to Raleigh by addressing him as thou, and finally hurst into 
the contemptuous “I thou thee, thou traitor!” And in “Twelfth 
Night” Sir Toby Belch urges Sir Andrew Aguecheek to provoke 
the disguised Viola to combat by thouing her. In our own time, 
with thou passed out entirely, even as a pronoun of contempt, the 
confusion between you in the plural and you in the singular presents 
plain difficulties to a man of limited linguistic resources. He gets 
around them by setting up a distinction that is well supported by 
logic and analogy. “I seen yous” is clearly separated from “I seen 
you .” And in the conjoint position “yous guys” is separated from 
(f you liar.” 

Let us now glance at the demonstrative and relative pronouns. 
Of the former there are but two in English, this and that, with 
their plural forms, these and those. To them, American adds a 
third, them, which is also the personal pronoun of the third person, 
objective case. 76 In addition it had adopted certain adverbial pro¬ 
nouns, this-here, these-here, that-there, those-there and them-there, 
and set up inflections of the original demonstratives by analogy with 
mine, hisn and yourn, to wit, thisn, thesen, thatn and thosen. I pre¬ 
sent some examples of everyday use: 

Them are the kind I like. 

Them men all work here. 

Who is this-here Smith I hear about? 

These-here are mine. 

That-there medicine ain’t no good. 

Those-there wops lias all took to the woods. 

I wisht I had one of them-there Fords. 

Thisn is better’n thatn. 

I like thesen better’n thosen. 

The origin of the demonstratives of the thisn-grouip is plain: they 
are degenerate forms of this-one, that-one, etc., just as none is a 
degenerate composition form of no (t)-one. In every case of their 

76 It occurs, too, of course, in other dialects of English, though by no means 
in all. The Irish influence probably had something to do with its prosperity 
in vulgar American. At all events, the Irish use it in the American manner. 
Joyce, in English As We Speak It in Ireland, pp. 34-5, argues that this usage 
was suggested by Gaelic. In Gaelic the accusative pronouns, e, i and iad 
( = him, her and them) are often used in place of the nominatives, se, si and 
siad (—he, she and they), as in “is iad sin na buaehaillidhe” (—them are the 
boys). This is “good grammar” in Gaelic, and the Irish, when they began to 
learn English, translated the locution literally. The familiar Irish “John is 
dead and him always so hearty” shows the same influence. 


THE COMMON SPEECH 


303 


use that I have observed the simple demonstratives might have been 
set free and one actually substituted for the terminal n. But it must 
be equally obvious that they have been reinforced very greatly by 
the absolutes of the hisn-g roup, for in their relation to the original 
demonstratives they play the part of just such absolutes and are 
never used conjointly. Thus, one says, in American, “I take thisn'’ 
or “thisn is mine,” but one never says “I take thisn hat” or “thisn 
dog is mine.” In this conjoint situation plain this is always used, 
and the same rule applies to these, those and that Them, being a 
newcomer among the demonstratives, has not yet acquired an in¬ 
flection in the absolute. I have never heard themn, and it will 
probably never come in, for it is forbiddingly clumsy. One says, 
in American, both “them are mine” and “them collars are mine.” 

This-here, these-here, that-there, those-there and them-there are 
plainly combinations of pronouns and adverbs, and their function is 
to support the distinction between proximity, as embodied in this 
and these, and remoteness, as embodied in that, those and them. 
“This-here coat is mine” simply means “this coat here, or this pres¬ 
ent coat, is mine.” But the adverb promises to coalesce with the 
pronoun so completely as to obliterate all sense of its distinct exist¬ 
ence, even as a false noun or adjective. As commonly pronounced, 
this-here becomes a single word, somewhat like thish-yur, and these- 
here becomes these-yur, and that-there and themrthere become that- 
ere and themrere. Those-there, if I observe accurately, is still pro¬ 
nounced more distinctly, but it, too, may succumb to composition in 
time. The adverb will then sink to the estate of a mere inflectional 
particle, as one has done in the absolutes of the thisn-growp. Them, 
as a personal pronoun in the absolute, of course, is commonly pro¬ 
nounced em, as in “I seen em,” and sometimes its vowel is almost 
lost, but this is also the case in all save the most exact spoken Eng¬ 
lish. Sweet and Lounsbury, following the German grammarians, 
argue that this em is not really a debased form of them, but the off¬ 
spring of hem, which survived as the regular plural of the third 
person in the objective case down to the beginning of the fifteenth 
century. But in American tJiem is clearly pronounced as a demon¬ 
strative. I have never heard “em men” or “em are the kind I like,” 
but always “them men” and “them are the kind I like.” 


304 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


The relative pronouns, so far as I have been able to make out, are 
declined as follows: 


Nominative 

Possessive 

Objective 


who 

which 

what 

that 

j whose 

whose 



( whosen 

whosen 



who 

which 

what 

that 


Two things will be noted in this paradigm. First there is the dis¬ 
appearance of whom as the objective form of who, and secondly 
there is the appearance of an inflected form of whose in the absolute, 
by analogy with mine, hisn and thesen. Whom, as we have seen, 
is fast disappearing from standard spoken American; 77 in the vulgar 
language it is already virtually extinct. Not only is who used in 
such constructions as te who did you find there ?” where even standard 
spoken English would tolerate it, but also in such constructions as 
“the man who I saw,” “them who I trust in” and “to who ?” Krapp 
explains this use of who on the ground that there is a “general feel¬ 
ing,” due to the normal word-order in English, that “the word which 
precedes the verb is the subject word, or at least the subject form.” 78 
But this explanation is probably fanciful. Among the plain people 
no such “general feeling” for case exists. Their only “general feel¬ 
ing” is a prejudice against case inflections in any form whatsoever. 
They use who in place of whom simply because they can discern 
no logical difference between the significance of the one and the 
significance of the other. 

Who sen, which is still relatively rare, is obviously the offspring 
of the other absolutes in n. In the conjoint relation plain whose 
is always used, as in “ whose hat is that ?” and “the man whose dog 
bit me.” But in the absolute whosen is sometimes substituted, as 
in “if it ain’t him, then whosen is it?” The imitation is obvious. 
There is an analogous form of which, to wit, whichn, resting heavily 
on which one. Thus, “whichn do you like?” and “I didn’t say 
whichn” are plainly variations of “which one do you like ?” and “I 
didn’t say which one.” That, as we have seen, has a like form, 
thatn, but never, of course, in the relative situation. “I like thatn” 

n Chapter VI, Section 2. 

’* Modern English, p. 300. 


THE COMMON SPEECH 


305 


is familiar, but “the one thatn I like” is never heard. If that, as a 
relative, could be used absolutely, I have no doubt that it would 
change to thatn, as it does as a demonstrative. So with what. As 
things stand, it is sometimes substituted for that, as in “them’s 
the kind what I like.” Joined to but it can also take the place of 
that in other situations, as in “I don’t know but what.” 

The substitution of who for whom, in the objective case, just 
noticed, is typical of a general movement toward breaking down all 
case distinctions among the pronouns, where they make their last 
stand in English and its dialects. This movement, of course, is not 
peculiar to vulgar American; nor is it of recent beginning. So long 
ago as the fifteenth century the old clear distinction between ye, 
nominative, and you, objective, disappeared, and today the latter is 
used in both cases. Sweet says that the phonetic similarity between 
ye and thee, the objective form of the true second singular, was re¬ 
sponsible for this confusion . 79 In modern spoken English, indeed, 
you in the objective often has a sound far more like that of ye than 
like that of you, as, for example, in “how do y’ do ?” and in Ameri¬ 
can its vowel takes the neutral form of the e in the definite article, 
and the word becomes a sort of shortened yuh. But whenever 
emphasis is laid upon it, you becomes quite distinct, even in Ameri¬ 
can. In “I mean you,” for example, there is never any chance of 
mistaking it for ye. In Shakespeare’s time the other personal pro¬ 
nouns of the objective case threatened to follow you into the nomi¬ 
native, and there was a compensatory movement of the nominative 
pronouns toward the objective. Lounsbury has collected many ex¬ 
amples . 80 Marlowe used “is it him you seek “ ’tis her I esteem” 
and “nor thee nor them shall want”; Fletcher used “ ’tis her I ad¬ 
mire”; Shakespeare himself used “that’s me.” Contrariwise, Web¬ 
ster used “what difference is between the duke and I?” and Green 
used “nor earth nor heaven shall part my love and I.” Krapp has 
unearthed many similar examples from the Restoration dramatists . 81 
Etheredge used “ ’tis them ” “it may be him,” “let you and I” and 
“nor is it me” ; Matthew Prior, in a famous couplet, achieved this: 

w A New English Grammar, pt. i, p. 339. 

*• History of the English Language, pp. 274-5. 

"Modern English, pp. 288-9. 


306 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


For thou art a girl as much brighter than her 
As he was a poet sublimer than me. 


The free exchange continued, in fact, until the eighteenth cen¬ 
tury was well advanced; there are examples of it in Addison. More¬ 
over, it survived, at least in- part, even the attack that was then made 
upon it by the professors of the new-born science of English gram¬ 
mar, and to this day “it is me” is still in more or less good col¬ 
loquial use. Sweet thinks that it is supported in such use, though 
not, of course, grammatically, by the analogy of the correct “it is he” 
and “it is she.” Lounsbury, following Dean Alford, says it came 
into English in imitation of the French cest moi, and defends it as 
at least as good as “it is I.” 82 The contrary form, “between you 
and I” has no defenders, and is apparently going out. But in the 
shape of “between my wife and I” it is seldom challenged, at least 
in spoken English. 

All these liberties with the personal pronouns, however, fade to 
insignificance when put beside the thoroughgoing confusion of the 
case forms in vulgar American. “Us fellas’’ is so far established 
in the language that “we fellas” from the mouth of a car conductor 
would seem almost an affectation. So, too, is “me and her are 
friends.” So, again, are “her and I set down together,” “him and 
his wife,” and “I knowed it was her .” Here are some other charac¬ 
teristic examples of the use of the objective forms in the nominative 
from Charters, Lardner and other writers: 

Me and her was both late. 

His brother is taller than him. 

That little boy was me. 

Us girls went home. 

They were John and him. 

Her and little A1 is to stay here. 

She says she thinks us and the Allens. 

If Weaver and them had not of begin kicking. 


82 Every now and then it is furiously debated in the American newspapers. 
When, early in 1921, Edward J. Tobin, superintendent of the schools of Cook 
county, Ill. (i. e., of Chicago), decided that the pupils might use it, the decision 
was discussed all over the country, and for weeks. See the New York World, 
Feb. 23, 1921; the New Vork Evening World, March 1, and the New York 
Times (a letter from Frank H. Vizetelly), Feb. 24. See also Jespersen: Chap¬ 
ters on English, p. 101 and p. 142. Mr. Tobin is also said to have given his 
imprimatur to he don’t. 



THE COMMON SPEECH 


307 


Us two’ll walk, me and him. 

But not me. 

Him and I are friends. 

Me and them are friends. 

Less numerous, but still varied and plentiful, are the substitutions 
of nominative forms for objective forms: 

She gave it to mother and 7. 

She took all of we children. 

I want you to meet he and 7 at 29th street. 

It is going to cost me $6 a week for a room for she and the baby. 

Anything she has is 0. K. for 7 and Florrie. 88 

Here are some grotesque confusions, indeed. Perhaps the best 
way to get at the principles underlying them is to examine first, not 
the cases of their occurrence, but the cases of their non-occurrence. 
Let us begin with the transfer of the objective form to the nomina¬ 
tive in the subject relation. “Me and her was both late” is obvi¬ 
ously sound American; one hears it, or something like it, on the 
streets every day. But one never hears “me was late” or “her was 
late” or “us was late” or “him was late” or “them was late.” Again, 
one hears “us girls was there” but never “us was there.” Yet again, 
one hears “her and John was married,” but never “her was married.” 
The distinction here set up should be immediately plain. It exactly 
parallels that between her and hem, our and oum, their and theim: 
the tendency, as Sweet says, is “to merge the distinction of nomina¬ 
tive and objective in that of conjoint and absolute.” 84 The nomi¬ 
native, in the subject relation, takes the usual nominative form only 
when it is in immediate contact with its verb. If it be separated 
from its verb by a conjunction or any other part of speech, even 
including another pronoun, it takes the objective form. Thus “me 
went home” would strike even the most ignorant shopgirl as “bad 
grammar,” but she would use “me and my friend went” or “me and 
him” or “he and her” or “me and them” without the slightest hesi¬ 
tation. What is more, if the separation be effected by a conjunction 
and another pronoun, the other pronoun also changes to the objective 

Sometimes the two errors are combined, as in a speech heard by a corre¬ 
spondent from the lips of a Wyoming hotel-keeper: “Between 7 and you, him 
and her drinks too much.” 

M A New English Grammar, pt. i, p. 341. 


308 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


form, even though its contact with the verb may be immediate. Thus 
one hears "me and her was there,” not “me and she”; “her and him 
kissed,” not “her and he.” Still more, this second pronoun com¬ 
monly undergoes the same inflection even when the first member of 
the group is not another pronoun, but a noun. Thus one hears 
“John and her was married,” not “ John and she.” To this rule 
there is but one exception, and that is in the case of the first person 
pronoun, especially in the singular. “Him and me are friends” is 
heard often, but “him and I are friends” is also heard. I seems to 
suggest the subject very powerfully; it is actually the subject of 
perhaps a majority of the sentences uttered by an ignorant man. 
At all events, it resists the rule, at least partially, and may even 
do so when actually separated from the verb by another pronoun, 
itself in the objective form, as, for example, in “I and him were 
there.” 

In the predicate relation the pronouns respond to a more complex 
regulation. When they follow any form of the simple verb of being 
they take the objective form, as in “it’s me” “it ain’t him ” and “I am 
him,” probably because the transitiveness of this verb exerts a 
greater pull than its function as a mere copula, and perhaps, too, 
because the passive naturally tends to put the speaker in the place 
of the object. “I seen he” or “he kissed she” or “he struck I” would 
seem as ridiculous to an ignorant American as to the Archbishop of 
Canterbury, and his instinct for simplicity and regularity naturally 
tends to make him reduce all similar expressions, or what seem to 
him to be similar expressions, to coincidence with the more seemly 
“I seen him.” After all, the verb of being is fundamentally transi¬ 
tive, and, in some ways, the most transitive of all verbs, and so it is 
not illogical to bring its powers over the pronoun into accord with 
the powers exerted by the others. I incline to think that it is some 
such subconscious logic, and not the analogy of “it is he” as Sweet 
argues, that has brought “it is me” to conversational respectability, 
even among rather careful speakers of English . 85 

85 It may be worth noting that the archaic misuse of me for my, as in “I lit me 
pipe,” is almost unknown in American, either standard or vulgar, though a 
correspondent in Philadelphia tells me that it is a localism in that city, and 
it is sometimes used by elderly persons of Irish birth. Even “me own” is 
seldom heard. This survival of Middle English pronunciation of mi (—my) is 
very common in England. 


THE COMMON SPEECH 


309 


But against this use of the objective form in the nominative posi¬ 
tion after the verb of being there also occurs in American a use of 
the nominative form in the objective position, as in “she gave it to 
mother and I” and “she took all of we children.” What lies at the 
bottom of it seems to be a feeling somewhat resembling that which 
causes the use of the objective form before the verb, but exactly 
contrary in its effects. That is to say, the nominative form is used 
when the pronoun is separated from its governing verb, whether 
by a noun, a noun-phrase or another pronoun, as in “she gave it to 
mother and I,” “she took all of we children” and “he paid her and I,” 
respectively. But here usage is far from fixed, and one observes 
variations in both directions—that is, toward using the correct objec¬ 
tive when the pronoun is detached from the verb, and toward using 
the nominative even when it directly follows the verb. “She gave 
it to mother and me,” “she took all of us children” and “he paid her 
and me” would probably sound quite as correct, to a Knight of 
Pythias, as the forms just given. And at the other end Charters 
and Lardner report such forms as “I want you to meet he and I” 
and “it is going to cost me $6 a week for a room for she and the 
baby.” I have noticed, however, that the use of the nominative is 
chiefly confined to the pronoun of the first person, and particularly 
to its singular. Here again we have an example of the powerful 
way in which I asserts itself. And superimposed upon that influ¬ 
ence is a cause mentioned by Sweet in discussing “between you and 
I ” 86 It is a sort of by-product of the pedagogical war upon “it is 
me” “As such expressions,” he says, “are still denounced by the 
gra mm ars, many people try to avoid them in speech as well as in 
writing. The result of this reaction is that the me in such construc¬ 
tions as ‘between John and me’ and ‘he saw John and me’ sounds 
vulgar and ungrammatical, and is consequently corrected into I” 
Here the pedagogues, seeking to impose an inelastic and illogical 
grammar upon a living speech, succeed only in corrupting it still 
more. 

Following than and as the American uses the objective form of 
the pronoun, as in “he is taller than me” and “such as her.” He 
also uses it following like, but not when, as often happens, he uses 
M A New English Grammar, pt. i, p. 341. 


310 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


the word in place of as or as if. Thus he says “do it like him” but 
“do it like he does” and “she looks like she was sick.” What appears 
here is an instinctive feeling that these words, followed by a pronoun 
only, are not adverbs, but prepositions, and that they should have 
the same power to put the pronoun into an oblique case that other 
prepositions have. Just as “the taller of we” would sound absurd 
to all of us, so “taller than he,” to the unschooled American, sounds 
absurd. This feeling has a good deal of respectable support. “As 
her” was used by Swift, “than me” by Burke, and “than whom” by 
Milton. The brothers Fowler show that, in some cases, “than him” 
is grammatically correct and logically necessary. 87 For example, 
compare “I love you more than him” and “I love you more than 
he.” The first means “I love you more than (I love) him”; the 
second, “I love you more than he (loves you).” In the first him 
does not refer to I, which is nominative, but to you , which is objec¬ 
tive, and so it is properly objective also. But the American, of 
course, uses him even when the preceding noun is in the nominative, 
save only when another verb follows the pronoun. Thus, he says, 
“I love you better than him,” but “I love you better than he does.” 

In the matter of the reflexive pronouns the American vulgate 
exhibits forms which plainly show that it is the spirit of the lan¬ 
guage to regard self, not as an adjective, which it is historically, 
but as a noun. This confusion goes back to Anglo-Saxon days; it 
originated at a time when both the adjectives and the nouns were 
losing their old inflections. Such forms as Petrussylf (= Peter s 
self), Cristsylf (= Christ’s self) and Icsylf {—I, self) then came 
into use, and along with them came combinations of self and the 
genitive, still surviving in hisself and theirselves (or theirself). 
Down to the sixteenth century these forms remained in perfectly 
good usage. “Each for hisself,” for example, was written by Sir 
Philip Sidney, and is to be found in the dramatists of the time, 
though modem editors always change it to himself. How the dative 
pronoun got itself fastened upon self in the third person masculine 
and neuter is one of the mysteries of language, but there it is, and 
so, against all logic, history and grammatical regularity, himself, 
themselves and itself (not its-self) are in favor today. But the 
87 The King’s English, p. 63. 




THE COMMON SPEECH 


311 


American, as usual, inclines against these illogical exceptions to the 
rule set by myself. I constantly hear hisself and their selves, 
as in “he done it hisself ’ and “they know theirselves.” Also, the 
emphatic own is often inserted between the pronoun and the noun, 
as in “let every man save his own self.” In general the American 
vnlgate makes very extensive use of the reflexive. It is constantly 
thrown in for good measure, as in “I overeat myself” and it is as 
constantly used singly, as in “self and wife.” 

The American pronoun does not necessarily agree with its noun 
in number. I find “I can tell each one what they make,” “each 
fellow put their foot on the line,” “nobody can do what they like” 
and “she was one of these kind 88 of people” in Charters, and “I am 
not the kind of man that is always thinking about their record,” 
“if he was to hit a man in the head . . . they would think their 
nose tickled” in Lardner. At the bottom of this error there is a 
real difficulty: the lack of a pronoun of the true common gender in 
English, corresponding to the French soi and son . 89 His, after a 
noun or pronoun connoting both sexes, often sounds inept, and his-or- 
her is intolerably clumsy. Thus the inaccurate plural is often substi¬ 
tuted. The brothers Fowler have discovered “anybody else who have 
only themselves in view” in Richardson and “everybody is discon¬ 
tented with their lot” in Disraeli, and Ruskin once wrote “if a cus¬ 
tomer wishes you to injure their foot.” In spoken American, even 
the most careful, they and their often appear; I turn to the Congres¬ 
sional Record at random and in two minutes find “if anyone will look 
at the bank statements they will see.” 90 In the lower reaches of the 
language the plural seems to get into every sentence of any com¬ 
plexity, even when the preceding noun or pronoun is plainly singu¬ 
lar. Such forms as “every man knows their way,” and “nobody 
oughter never take what ain’t theim” are quite common. 

In demotic American the pedantry which preserves such forms 
as someone's else is always disregarded; someone else’s is invariably 

“Here, of course, kind is probably felt to be plural. Those is used in the 
same way, as in “those are the kind.” 

89 Them, as we have seen, was proposed so long ago as 1858, but it has never 
established itself. 

60 “Hon.” Edward E. Browne, of Wisconsin, in the House of Representatives, 
July 18, 1918, p. 9965. 


312 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


used. I have heard “who else’s wife was there?” and “if it ain’t 
his’n, it ain’t nobody here else’s.” Finally, I note that he’s seems 
to be assimilating with his. In such sentences as “I hear he’s coming 
here to work,” the sound of he’s is precisely that of his. 


5. 


The Adverb 

All the adverbial endings in English, save -ly, have gradually 
fallen into decay; it is the only one that is ever used to form new 
adverbs. At earlier stages of the language various other endings 
were used, and some of them survive in a few old words, though they 
are no longer employed in making new words. The Anglo-Saxon 
endings were -e and -lice. The latter was, at first, merely an 
-e-ending to adjectives in -lie, but after a time it attained to inde¬ 
pendence and was attached to adjectives not ending in -lie. In early 
Middle English this -lice changed to -like, and later on to -li and -ly. 
Meanwhile, the -emending, following the -e-endings of the nouns, 
adjectives and verbs, ceased to he pronounced, and so it gradually 
fell away. Thus a good many adverbs came to be indistinguishable 
from their ancestral adjectives, for example, hard in to pull hard, 
loud in to speak loud, and deep in to bury deep (= Anglo-Saxon, 
deop-e ). Worse, not a few adverbs actually became adjectives, for 
example, wide, which was originally the Anglo-Saxon adjective void 
(= wide) with the adverbial -e-ending, and late, which was origi¬ 
nally the Anglo-Saxon adjective leet (= slow ) with the same ending. 

The result of this movement toward identity in form was a con¬ 
fusion between the two classes of words, and from the time of 
Chaucer down to the eighteenth century one finds innumerable in¬ 
stances of the use of the simple adjective as an adverb. “He will 
answer trewe” is in Sir Thomas More; “and soft unto himself he 
sayd” in Chaucer; “the singers sang loud” in the Authorized Version 
of the Bible (Nehemiah xii, 42), and “•indifferent well” in Shake¬ 
speare. Even after the purists of the eighteenth century began their 
corrective work this confusion continued. Thus one finds “the 


THE COMMON SPEECH 


313 


people are miserable poor” in Hume, “how unworthy you treated 
mankind” in the Spectator, and “wonderful silly” in Joseph Butler. 
To this day the grammarians battle against the amalgamation, still 
without complete success; every new volume of rules and regula¬ 
tions for those who would speak by the book is full of warnings 
against it. Among the great masses of the plain people, it goes 
without saying, it flourishes unimpeded. The cautions of the 
school-marm, in a matter so subtle and so plainly lacking in logic 
or necessity, are forgotten as quickly as her prohibition of the double 
negative, and thereafter the adjective and the adverb tend more and 
more to coalesce in a part of speech which serves the purposes of 
both, and is simple and intelligible and satisfying. 

Charters gives a number of characteristic examples of its use: 
“wounded very bad” “I sure was stiff,” “drank out of a cup easy ” 
“he looked up quick” Many more are in Lardner: “a chance to see 
me work regular,” “I am glad I was lucky enough to marry happy” 
“I beat them easy” and so on. And others fall upon the ear every 
day: “he done it proper” “he done himself proud,” “she was dressed 
neat,” “she was awful ugly,” “the horse ran 0. K.” “it near finished 
him,” “it sells quick,” “I like it fine,” “he et hoggish,” “she acted 
mean,” “he loved her something fierce,” “they keep company 
steady.” The bob-tailed adverb, indeed, enters into a large number 
of the commonest coins of vulgar speech. Near-silk, I daresay, is 
properly nearly-silk. The grammarians protest that “run slow” 
should be “run slowly.” But near-silk and “run slow” remain, and 
so do “to be in bad,” “it sure will help,” “to play it up strong” and 
their brothers. What we have here is simply an incapacity to dis¬ 
tinguish any ponderable difference between adverb and adjective, 
and beneath it, perhaps, is the incapacity, already noticed in dealing 
with “it is me,” to distinguish between the common verb of being and 
any other verb. If “it is bad” is correct, then why should “it leaks 
bad” be incorrect? It is just this disdain of purely grammatical 
reasons that is at the bottom of most of the phenomena visible in 
vulgar American, and the same impulse is observable in all other 
languages during periods of inflectional decay. During the highly 
inflected stage of a language the parts of speech are sharply distinct 
but when inflections fall off they tend to disappear. The adverb, 



314 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


being at best the step-child of grammar—as the old Latin gram¬ 
marians used to say, “Omnis 'pars orationis migrat in adverbium ”— 
is one of the chief victims of this anarchy. John Horne Tooke, 
despairing of bringing it to any order, even in the most careful 
English, called it, in his “Diversions of Purley,” “the common sink 
and repository of all heterogeneous and unknown corruptions.” 

Where an obvious logical or lexical distinction has grown up be¬ 
tween an adverb and its primary adjective the unschooled American 
is very careful to give it its terminal -ly. For example, he seldom 
confuses hard and hardly, scarce and scarcely, real and really. 
These words convey different ideas. Hard means unyielding; 
hardly means barely. Scarce means present only in small numbers; 
scarcely is substantially synonymous with hardly. Real means genu¬ 
ine; really is an assurance of veracity. So, again, with late and 
lately. Thus, an American says “I don’t know, scarcely,” not “I 
don’t know, scarce”; “he died lately” not “he died late.” 91 But in 
nearly all such cases syntax is the preservative, not grammar. 
These adverbs seem to keep their tails largely because they are com¬ 
monly put before and not after verbs, as in, for example, “I hardly 
(or scarcely ) know,” and “I really mean it.” Many other adverbs 
that take that position habitually are saved as well, for example, 
generally, usually, surely, certainly. But when they follow verbs 
they often succumb, as in “I’ll do it sure” and “I seen him recent.” 
And when they modify adjectives they sometimes succumb, too, as 
in “it was sure hot.” Practically all the adverbs made of adjectives 
in -y lose the terminal -ly and thus become identical with their adjec¬ 
tives. I have never heard mightily used; it is always mighty, as in 
“he hit him mighty hard.” So with filthy, dirty, nasty, lowly, 
naughty and their cognates. One hears “he acted dirty,” “he spoke 
nasty,” “the child behaved naughty,” and so on. Here even standard 
English has had to make concessions to euphony. Cleanlily is seldom 
used; cleanly nearly always takes its place. And the use of illy and 
thusly is confined to ignoramuses. 

Vulgar American, like all the higher forms of American and all 

81 1 have, however, noted “here late” for “here lately.” But it is obviously 
derived from “here of late.” The use of real, as in real nice, real smart, real 
good, etc., is an exception. But the American Legionary distinguishes between 
real nice and really true. He never says, “I real saw him.” 


THE COMMON SPEECH 


315 


save the most precise form of written English, has abandoned the 
old inflections of here, there and where, to wit, hither and hence, 
thither and thence, whither and whence. These fossil remains of 
dead cases are fast disappearing from the language. In the case of 
hither (= to here) even the preposition has been abandoned. One 
says, not “I came to here,” but simply “I came here” In the case 
of hence, however, from here i3 still used, and so with from there 
and from where. Finally, it goes without saying that the common 
American tendency to add -s to such adverbs as towards is carried 
to full length in the vulgar language. One constantly hears, not only 
somewheres and forwards, but even noways and anyways, where’- 
bouts and here’bouts. Here we have but one more example of the 
movement toward uniformity and simplicity. Anyways is obviously 
fully supported by sideways and always. 


6 . 

The Noun 

The only inflections of the noun remaining in English are those 
for number and for the genitive, and so it is in these two regions that 
the few variations to be noted in vulgar American occur. The rule 
that, in forming the plurals of compound nouns or noun-phrases, the 
-5 shall be attached to the principal noun is commonly disregarded, 
and it goes at the end. Thus, “I have two sons-vn-law” is never 
heard among the plain people; one always hears “I have two son-in- 
laws.” So with the genitive. I once overheard this: “that umbrella 
is the young lady I go with’s.” Often a false singular is formed from 
a singular ending in s, the latter being mistaken for a plural. Chinee, 
Portugee and Japanee are familiar; I have also noted trapee, 
specie, 92 tactic and summon (from trapeze, species, tactics and 
summons). 93 Paradoxically, the word incidence is commonly mis- 

M This occasionally gets into print, along with tactic. See South American 
Travels, by Henry Stephens; New York, 1915, p. 114. Specie is also used by 
Ezra Pound in his translation of Remy de Gourmont’s The Natural Philosophy 
of Love; New York, 1922. 

•* It is possible that hoakum, the verb of which is to hoak, is a similar back- 
formation from hoax. 



316 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


used for incident, as in “he told an incidence/' Here incidence (or 
incident ) seems to be regarded as a synonym, not for happening, 
but for story. I have never heard “he told of an incidence/' The 
of is always omitted. The general disregard of number often shows 
itself when the noun is used as object. I have already quoted Lard- 
ner’s “some of the men has brung their wife along”; in a popular 
magazine I lately encountered “those book ethnologists . . . can’t 
see what is before their nose/' Many similar examples might be 
brought forward. 


7 . 

The Adjective 

The adjectives in English are inflected only for comparison, and 
the American commonly uses them correctly, with now and then a 
double comparative or superlative to ease his soul. More better is 
the commonest of these. It has a good deal of support in logic. 
A sick man is reported today to be better. Tomorrow he is further 
improved. Is he to be reported better again, or best ? The standard 
language gets around the difficulty by using still better. The Ameri¬ 
can vulgate boldly employs more better. In the case of worse, worser 
is used, as Charters shows. He also reports baddest, more queerer 
and beautifullest. Littler, which he notes, is still outlawed from 
standard English, but it has, with littlest, a respectable place in 
American. Richard Harding Davis wrote a one-act play called 
“The Littlest Girl.” The American freely compares adjectives that 
are incapable of the inflection logically. Charters reports most 
principal, and I myself have heard uniquer and even more uniquer, 
as in “I have never saw nothing more uniquer." I have also heard 
more ultra, more worse, idealer, liver (that is, more energetic, more 
alive), and wettest, as in “he was the wellest man you ever seen.” 94 
In general, the -er and -est terminations are used instead of the more 
and most prefixes, as in beautiful, beautifuller, beautifullest. The 
fact that the comparative relates to two and the superlative to more 

M To which may be added furtherest, which appeared in a Chicago despatch 
on the first page of the San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 2, 1922. 


THE COMMON SPEECH 


317 


than two is almost always forgotten. I have never heard “the better 
of the two,” in the popular speech, blit always “the best of the 
two.” Charters also reports “the hardest of the two” and “my 
brother and I measured and he was the tallest.” I have frequently 
heard “it ain’t so worse/’ but here a humorous effect seems to have 
been intended. 

Adjectives are made much less rapidly in American than either 
substantives or verbs. The only suffix that seems to be in general 
use for that purpose is -y, as in tony, classy, daffy, nutty, dinky, 
leery, etc. The use of the adjectival prefix super- is confined to the 
more sophisticated classes; the plain people seem to be unaware of 
it. 95 This relative paucity of adjectives appears to be common to 
the more primitive varieties of speech. E. J. Hills, in his 
elaborate study of the vocabulary of a child of two, 96 found that it 
contained but 23 descriptive adjectives, of which six were the names 
of colors, as against 59 verbs and 173 common nouns. Moreover, 
most of the 23 minus six were adjectives of all work, such as nasty, 
funny and nice. Colloquial American uses the same rubber-stamps 
of speech. Funny connotes the whole range of the unusual; hard 
indicates every shade of difficulty; nice is everything satisfactory; 
wonderful is a superlative of almost limitless scope. 

The decay of one to a vague rt-sound, as in this’n, is matched by a 
decay of than after comparatives. Earlier than is seldom if ever 
heard; composition reduces the two words to earlier n. So with 
better n, faster n, hotter n, deader n, etc. Once I overheard the 
following dialogue: “I like a belt more looser’n what this one is.” 
“Well, then, why don’t you unloosen it more’n you got it 
unloosened?” 

The almost universal confusion of liable and likely is to be noted. 
The former is nearly always used, as in, “he’s liable to be there” and 
“it ain’t liable to happen.” Likely is reserved for the sense of at¬ 
tractive, as in “a likely candidate.” 

“ Cf. Vogue Affixes in Present-Day Word-Coinage, by Louise Pound, Dialect 
Notes, vol. v, pt. i, 1918. 

88 The Speech of a Child Two Years of Age, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. ii, 1914. 


318 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


8 . 

The Double Negative 

Syntactically, perhaps the chief characteristic of vulgar American 
is its sturdy fidelity to the double negative. So freely is it used, 
indeed, that the simple negative appears to be almost abandoned. 
Such phrases as “I see nobody,” “I could hardly walk,” “I know 
nothing about it” are heard so seldom among the masses of the people 
that they appear to be affectations when encountered; the well-nigh 
universal forms are “I don’t see nobody,” “I couldn’t hardly walk,” 
and “I don’t know nothing about it.” Charters lists some very 
typical examples, among them, “he ain’t never coming back no 
more,” “you don’t care for nobody but yourself,” “couldn’t be no 
more happier” and “I can’t see nothing.” In Lardner there are innu¬ 
merable examples: “they was not no team,” “I have not never thought 
of that,” “I can’t write no more,” “no chance to get no money from 
nowhere,” “we can’t have nothing to do,” and so on. Some of his 
specimens show a considerable complexity, for example, “Matthew-* 
son was not only going as far as the coast,” meaning, as the context 
shows, that he was going as far as the coast and no further. Only 
gets into many other examples, e. g., “he hadn’t only the one pass,” 
“I can’t stay only a minute,” and “I don’t work nights no more, only 
except Sunday nights.” This last I got from a car conductor. Many 
other curious specimens are in my collectanea, among them: “one 
swaller don’t make no summer,” “I never seen nothing I would of 
rather saw,” and “once a child gets burnt once it won’t never stick 
its hand in no fire no more,” and so on. The last embodies a triple 
negative. In “You don’t know nobody what don’t want nobody to 
do nothing for ’em, do you?” there is a quadruplet. And in “the 
more faster you go, the sooner you don’t get there,” there is a mud¬ 
dling that almost defies analysis. 

Like most other examples of “bad grammar” encountered in 
American the compound negative is of great antiquity and was once 
quite respectable. The student of Anglo-Saxon encounters it con¬ 
stantly. In that language the negative of the verb was formed by 


THE COMMON SPEECH 


319 


prefixing a particle, ne. Thus, singan (= to sing ) became ne singan 
( = not to sing ). In case the verb began with a vowel the ne dropped 
its e and was combined with the verb, as in neefre (never), from 
ne-cefre (= not ever). In case the verb began with an h or a w 
followed by a vowel, the h or w of the verb and the e of ne were 
both dropped, as in ncefth {= has not), from ne-hcefth (= not 
has), and nolde (= would not), from ne-wolde. Finally, in case the 
vowel following a w was an i, it changed to y, as in nyste (= knew 
not), from ne-wiste. But inasmuch as Anglo-Saxon was a fully in¬ 
flected language the inflections for the negative did not stop with the 
verbs; the indefinite article, the indefinite pronoun and even some 
of the nouns were also inflected, and survivors of those forms appear 
to this day in such words as none and nothing. Moreover, when an 
actual inflection was impossible it was the practise to insert this ne 
before a word, in the sense of our no or not. Still more, it came to 
be the practise to reinforce ne, before a vowel, with na (= not) or 
naht (— nothing) , which later degenerated to nat and not. As a 
result, there were fearful and wonderful combinations of negatives, 
some of them fully matching the best efforts of Lardner’s baseball 
players. Sweet gives several curious examples. 97 “Nan ne dorste 
nan thing ascian,” translated literally, becomes “no one dares not ask 
nothing.” “Thset hus na ne feoll” becomes “the house did not fall 
not.” As for the Middle English “he never nadde nothing it has 
too modern and familiar a ring to need translating at all. Chaucer, 
at the beginning of the period of transition to Modem English, used 
the double negative with the utmost freedom. In “The Knight’s 
Tale” is this: 

He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde 

In al his lyf unto no maner wight. 

By the time of Shakespeare this license was already much re¬ 
stricted, but a good many double negatives are nevertheless to be 
found in his plays, and he was particularly shaky in the use of nor. 
In “Richard III” one finds “I never was nor never will be”; in 
“Measure for Measure,” “harp not on that nor do not banish trea¬ 
son,” and in “Romeo and Juliet,” “thou expectedst not, nor I looked 

97 A New English Grammar, pt. i, pp. 437-8. 


320 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


not for.” This misuse of nor is still very frequent. Even 
worse forms get into the Congressional Record. Not long ago, 
for example, I encountered “without hardly an exception” in a pub¬ 
lic paper of the utmost importance. 98 There are, indeed, situations 
in which the double negative leaps to the lips or from the pen almost 
irresistibly; even such careful writers as Huxley, Robert Louis 
Stevenson and Leslie Stephen have occasionally dallied with it. 99 
It is perfectly allowable in the Romance languages, and, as we have 
seen, is almost the rule in the American vulgate. Now and then 
some anarchistic student of the language boldly defends and even 
advocates it. “The double negative,” said a writer in the London 
Review a long time ago, 100 “has been abandoned to the great injury 
of strength of expression.” Surely “I won’t take nothing” is 
stronger than either “I will take nothing” or “I won’t take any¬ 
thing.” 


Other Syntactical Peculiarities 

“Language begins,” says Sayce, “with sentences, not with single 
words.” In a speech in process of rapid development, unrestrained 
by critical analysis, the tendency to sacrifice the integrity of words 
to the needs of the complete sentence is especially marked. One finds 
it clearly in American. Already we have examined various assimi¬ 
lation and composition forms: that’n, use’to, would’a, them’ere and 
so on. Many others are observable. Off’n is a good example; it 
comes from off of and shows a preposition decaying to the form of a 
mere inflectional particle. One constantly hears “I bought it off’n 
John.” Sort’a, hind’a and their like follow in the footsteps of 
would’a. Usen’t follows the analogy of don’t and wouldn’t, as in 
“I didn’t usen’t to be.” Would’ve and should’ve are widely used; 
Lardner commonly hears them as would of and should of. The 
neutral (^particle also appears in other situations, especially before 

“ Report of Edward J. Brundage, attorney-general of Illinois, on the East 
St. Louis massacre, Congressional Record, Jan. 7, 1918, p. 661. 

“ The King’s English, op. cit. 

1,0 Oct. 1, 1864. 


THE COMMON SPEECH 


321 


way, as in tliat-a way, this-a way and atta-boy. It is found again 
in a tall, a liaison form of at all. 101 

Various minor syntactical peculiarities may be noticed; an ex¬ 
haustive study of them would afford materials for a whole volume. 
The use of all the further, as in, “it was all the further I could go,” 
seems to be American. It has bred many analogues, e. g., “is that all 
the later it is?” Another curious formation employs there with 
various negatives in an unusual way; it is illustrated in “there 
can’t anyone break me.” Again, there is the use of in in such 
constructions as “he caught in back of the plate,” apparently sug¬ 
gested by in front. Yet again, there is the use of too and so as 
intensives, as in “You are, too” and “You are, so.” Yet again, 
there is the substitution of what for that, as in “I don’t know but 
what.” Yet again, there is the growing tendency to omit the verb 
of action in phrases indicating desire or intent, as in, “he wants 
out” for “he wants to go out.” This last, I believe, originated as a 
Pennsylvania localism, and probably owes its genesis to Pennsyl¬ 
vania German, but of late it has begun to travel, and I have received 
specimens from all parts of the country. In the form of “Belgium 
wants in this protective arrangement” it has even got into a leading 
editorial in the Chicago Tribune, “the world’s greatest news¬ 
paper.” 102 


10 . 

Vulgar Pronunciation 

Before anything approaching a thorough and profitable study of 
the sounds of the American common speech is possible, there must 
be a careful assembling of the materials, and this, unfortunately, 
still awaits a phonologist of sufficient enterprise and equipment. 
Dr. William A. Read, of the State University of Louisiana, has made 
some excellent examinations of vowel and consonant sounds in the 
South, Dr. Louise Pound has done capital work of the same sort in 

101 A t all, by the way, is often displaced by any or none, as in “he don’t love 
her any” and “it didn’t hurt me none.” 

102 Nov. 10, 1919, p. 8. 


322 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


the Middle West, and there have been other regional studies of merit. 
But most of these become misleading by reason of their lack of 
scope; forms practically universal in the nation are discussed as 
dialectical variations. This is a central defect in the work of the 
American Dialect Society, otherwise very industrious and merito¬ 
rious. It is essaying to study localisms before having first platted 
the characteristics of the general speech. The dictionaries of Ameri¬ 
canisms deal with pronunciation only casually, and often very inac¬ 
curately; the remaining literature is meagre and unsatisfactory. 
Until the matter is gone into at length it will be impossible to dis¬ 
cuss any phase of it with exactness. No single investigator can 
examine the speech of the whole country; for that business a pooling 
of forces is necessary. But meanwhile it may be of interest to set 
forth a few provisional ideas. 

At the start two streams of influence upon vulgar American pro¬ 
nunciation may be noted, the one an inheritance from the English 
of the colonists, and the other arising spontaneously within the coun¬ 
try, and apparently much colored by immigration. The first influ¬ 
ence, it goes without saying, is gradually dying out. Consider, for 
example, the pronunciation of the diphthong oi. In Middle English 
it was as in boy, but during the early Modem English period it was 
assimilated with that of the i in wine, and this usage prevailed at 
the time of the settlement of America. The colonists thus brought 
it with them, and at the same time it lodged in Ireland, where it 
still prevails. But in England, during the eighteenth century, this 
{-sound was displaced in many words by the original o{-sound, not by 
historical research but by mere deduction from the spelling, and the 
new pronunciation soon extended to the polite speech of America. In 
the common speech, however, the {-sound persisted, and down to the 
time of the Civil War it was constantly heard in such words as boil, 
hoist, oil, join, poison and roil, which thus became bile, hist, He, jine, 
pisen and rile.. Since then the school-marm has combated it with 
such vigor that it has begun to disappear, and such forms as pisen, 
jine, bile and He are now very seldom heard, save as dialectic varia¬ 
tions. But in certain other words, perhaps supported by Irish influ¬ 
ence, the {-sound still persists. Chief among them are hoist and 



THE COMMON SPEECH 


323 


roiZ. 103 An unlearned American, wishing to say that he was enraged, 
never says that he was roiled, hut always that he was riled. Desiring 
to examine the hoof of his horse, he never orders the animal to hoist 
but always to hist. In the form of booze-hister, the latter is almost 
in good usage. I have seen booze-hister thus spelled and obviously 
to be thus pronounced, in an editorial article in the American Issue, 
organ of the Anti-Saloon League of America. 104 

Various similar misplaced vowels were brought from England by 
the- colonists and have persisted in America, while dying out of good 
English usage. There is, for example, short t in place of long e, 
as in critter for creature. Critter is common to almost all the dia¬ 
lects of English, but American has embedded the vowel in a word 
that is met with nowhere else and has thus become characteristic, 
to wit, crick for creek. Nor does any other dialect make such exten¬ 
sive use of slick for sleek. Again, there is the retention of the 
old flat a, as in sassy and apple-sass. England has substituted 
the broad a, but in America the flat a persists, and many 
Americans who use sassy every day would scarcely recognize saucy 
if they heard it. Yet again, there is quoit. Originally, the English 
pronounced it quate, but now they pronounce the diphthong as in 
doily. In the United States the quate pronunciation remains. 
Finally, there is deaf. Its proper pronunciation, in the England 
that the colonists left, was deef, but it now rhymes with Jeff. That 
new pronunciation has been adopted by polite American, despite the 
protests of Noah Webster, but in the common speech the word is 
still usually deef. 

However, a good many of the vowels of the early days have suc¬ 
cumbed to pedagogy. The American proletarian may still use skeer 
for scare, but in most of the other words of that class he now uses 
the vowel approved by correct English usage. Thus he seldom 
permits himself such old forms as dreen for drain, keer for care, 
skeerce for scarce or even cheer for chair. The Irish influence sup¬ 
ported them for a while, but now they are fast going out. So, too, 

103 Roil is obsolete in standard English. Krapp says that “in conventional 
cultivated use in America” a spelling pronunciation has arisen, making the 
word rhyme with oil. I have never encountered this pronunciation. All Ameri¬ 
cans, when they use roiled at all, seem to make it riled. 

104 Maryland edition, July 18, 1914, p. 1. 




324 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


are Tcivver for cover, crap for crop, and chist for chest. But Tattle 
for Tcettle still shows a certain vitality, rench is still used in place of 
rinse, and squinch in place of squint, and a flat a continues to dis¬ 
place various e-sounds in such words as rare for rear (e. g., as a 
horse), thrash for thresh , 105 and wrassle for wrestle. Contrariwise, 
e displaces a in catch and radish, which are commonly pronounced 
ketch and reddish. This e-sound was once accepted in standard 
English; when it got into spoken American it was perfectly sound; 
one still hears it from the most pedantic lips in any . 106 There are 
also certain other ancients that show equally unbroken vitality among 
us, for example, stomp for stamp, 107 snoot for snout, guardeen for 
guardian, janders for jaundice, muss for mess, and champeen for 
champion. 

But all these vowels, whether approved or disapproved, have been 
under the pressure, for the past century, of a movement toward a 
general vowel neutralization, and in the long run it promises to dis¬ 
pose of many of them. The same movement also affects standard 
English, as appears by Robert Bridges’ “Tract on the Present State 
of English Pronunciation,” but I believe that it is stronger in 
America, and will go farther, at least with the common speech, if 
only because of our unparalleled immigration. Standard English 
has 19 separate vowel sounds. No other living tongue of Europe, 
save Portuguese, has so many; most of the others have a good many 
less; Modern Greek has but five. The immigrant, facing all these 
vowels, finds some of them quite impossible; the Russian Jew, for 
example, cannot manage ur. As a result, he tends to employ a neu¬ 
tralized vowel in the situations which present difficulties, and this 
neutralized vowel, supported by the slip-shod speech-habits of the 
native proletariat, makes steady progress. It appears in many of 
the forms that we have been examining—in the final a of would-a, 
vaguely before the n in thisn and off’n, in place of the original d 

105 Here a distinction shows itself: a farmer thrashes his boy, but threshes 
his wheat. 

10 * Cf. Lounsbury: The Standard of Pronunciation in English, p. 172 ff. 

107 Stomp is used only in the sense of to stamp with the foot. One always 
stamps a letter. An analogue of stomp, accepted in correct English, is strop 
(e. g., razor-strop), from strap. In American champ (chomp) and tramp 
(tromp) tend to diverge in the same way. A horse ohomps its bit, but champ 
(— champion) retains the flat o. A cow tromps her fodder, but a tramp re¬ 
mains a tramp. 




THE COMMON SPEECH 


325 


in use' to, and in the common pronunciation of such words as been, 
come and have, particularly when they are sacrificed to sentence 
exigencies, as in “I b’n thinking,” “c'm 'ere,” and “he would’ve 
saw you.” 

Here we are upon a wearing down process that shows many other 
symptoms. One finds, not only vowels disorganized, but also conso¬ 
nants. Some are displaced by other consonants, measurably more 
facile; others are dropped altogether. D becomes the unvoiced t, 
as in holt, or is dropped, as in tole, bran-new, di'nt (— didn't) 
and fine (for find). In ast (for ask) t replaces k; when the 
same word is used in place of asked, as often happens, 

e. g., in “I ast him hi3 name,” it shoulders out ked. It is itself 
lopped off in bankrup, quanity, crep, step, wep, kep, gris'-mill and 
les (= let's = let us), and is replaced by d in kindergarden and 
pardner. L disappears, as in a'ready and gent'man. The 5 -sound 
becomes tsh, as in pincers, probably suggested by pinch. The 

same tsh replaces ct, as in pitcher for picture, and t, as in amachoor. 
G disappears from the ends of words, 108 and sometimes, too 
in the middle, as in stren'th and reco'nize. R, though it 

is better preserved in American than in English, is also 
under pressure, as appears by bust, Febuary, stuck on (for 

struck on), cuss (for curse), yestiddy, sa's'parella, patridge, 
ca'tridge, they is (for there is) and Sadd'y (for Saturday). An 
excrescent t survives in a number of words, e. g., onc't, twic't, clos't, 
wisht (for wish) and chanc't; it is an heirloom from the English of 
two centuries ago. So is the substitution of th for t in heighth. An 
excrescent b, as in chimbley and fambly, seems to be native. Whole 
syllables are dropped out of words, paralleling the English butchery 
of extraordinary; for example, in bound’ry, pro'bition, tamal 
(= eternal), complected, hist'ry, lib'ry and prob'ly. Ordinary, like 
extraordinary, is commonly enunciated clearly, but it has bred a 

108 But not all words in -g. Lardner calls my attention to the fact that any¬ 
thing and everything are almost always excepted. He says: “I used, occa¬ 
sionally, to sit on the players’ bench at baseball games, and it was there that I 
noted the exceptions made in favor of these two words. A player, returning 
to the bench after batting, would be asked, ‘Has he got anything in there?’ 
(‘He—in there’ always means the pitcher). The answer would be ‘He’s got 
everything .’ On the other hand, the player might return and (usually after 
striking out) say, ‘He hasn’t got nothin'* And the manager: ‘Looks like he 
must have somethin*.* ” 


326 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


degenerated form, onry or onery, differentiated in meaning. 109 Con¬ 
sonants are misplaced by metathesis, as in prespiration, hum 
derd, brethem, childem, libery, interduce, calvary, govrenment, 
modren and wosterd (for worsted). Ow is changed to er, as in piller, 
swaller, yeller, heller and holler, or to a, as in fella, or to i, as in 
minni (= minnow) ; the a is flattened and ice is changed to ers in 
janders. Words are given new syllables, as in ellum, fillum, lozerv- 
ger, athaletic, mischievious, mountainious, mayorality and munic- 
ipial, or new consonants, as in overhalls. 

In the complete sentence, assimilation makes this disorganization 
much more obvious. Meams, in a brief article, 110 gives many 
examples of the extent to which it is carried. He hears “wah zee 
say?” for “what does he say?”, “ware zee?” for “where is he?”, 
“ast ’er in” for “ask her in,” “itt’m owd” for “hit them out,” 
“sry” for “that is right,” and “c’ meer” for “come here.” He 
believes that the voiceless t is gradually succumbing to the voiced d. 
and cites “ass bedder” for “that’s better,” “wen juh ged din?” 
for “when did you get in?”, and “siddup” for “sit up.” One 
hears countless other such decayed forms on the street every day. 
Let’s is le’s. The neutral vowel replaces the oo of good in g’by. 
“What did you say ?” reduces itself to “wuz ay ?” Maybe is mebby, 
perhaps is p’raps, so long is s’long, excuse me is skus me; the com¬ 
mon salutation, “how are you?” is so dismembered that it finally 
emerges as a word almost indistinguishable from high. Here there 
is room for inquiry, and that inquiry deserves the best effort of 
American phonologists, for the language is undergoing rapid changes 
under their very eyes, or, perhaps more accurately, under their very 
ears, and a study of those changes should yield a great deal of inter¬ 
esting matter. How did the word stint, on American lips, first 
convert itself into stent and then into stunt? By what process was 
baulk changed into buck? 

A by-way that is yet to be so much as entered is that of naturalized 
loan-words in the common speech. A very characteristic word of 
that sort is sashay. Its relationship to the French chasse seems to 
be plain, and yet it has acquired meanings in American that differ 
very widely from the meaning of chasse. How widely it is dis- 

108 This word, when written, often appears as ornery, but it is almost always 
pronounced on’ry, with the first syllable rhyming with don. 

110 Our Own, Our Native Speech, McClure’s Magazine, Oct., 1916. 



THE COMMON SPEECH 


327 


persed may be seen by the fact that it is reported in popular use, 
as a verb signifying to prance or to walk consciously, in Southeastern 
Missouri, Nebraska, Northwestern Arkansas, Michigan, Eastern 
Alabama and Western Indiana, and, with slightly different meaning, 
on Cape Cod. The travels of cafe in America would repay investi¬ 
gation ; particularly its variations in pronunciation. I believe that 
it is fast becoming kaif. Plaza, boulevard, vaudeville, menu and 
rathskeller have entered into the common speech of the land, and are 
pronounced as American words. Such words, when they come in 
verbally, by actual contact with immigrants, commonly retain some 
measure of their correct native pronunciation. Spiel, kosher, ga/nof 
and matzoth are examples ; their vowels remain un-American. But 
words that come in visually, say through street-signs and the news¬ 
papers, are immediately overhauled and have thoroughly Ameri¬ 
canized vowels and consonants thereafter. School-teachers have been 
trying to establish various pseudo-French pronunciations of vase 
for fifty years past, but it still rhymes with face in the vulgate. 
Vaudeville is vawd-vill; boulevard has three syllables and a hard d at 
the end; plaza has a flat a; the first syllable of menu rhymes with bee; 
the first of rathskeller with cats; fiancee is fy-ance-y; nee rhymes 
with see; decollete is de-coll-ty; hofbrdu is huff brow; the German w 
has lost its v-sound and becomes an American w. I have, in my day, 
heard proteege for protege, habichoo for habitue, connisoor for com 
noisseur, shirtso for scherzo, premeer for premiere, dee tour for 
detour, eetood for etude and prelood for prelude. I once heard a 
burlesque show manager, in announcing a French dancing act, pro¬ 
nounce M. and Mile, as Em and Milly. Divorcee is divorcey, and has 
all the rakishness of the adjectives in -y. Creme de menthe is cream 
de mint. Schweizer is swite-ser. Roquefort is roke-fort. I have 
heard debut with the last syllable rhyming with nut. I have heard 
minoot for minuet. I have heard tchefdoover for chef-d’oeuvre . in 
And who doesn’t remember 

As I walked along the Boys Boo-long 

With an independent air 

and c 

Say aw re-vore, 

But not good-by! 

m On January 11, 1922, in reply to a reader who asked the proper pro¬ 
nunciation of danseuse, the Norfolk Post answered: “It’s pronounced dan-sooz, 
with the accent on the last syllable.” 



328 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


Charles James Fox, it is said, called the red wine of France Bor- 
dox to the end of his days. He had an American heart; his great 
speeches for the revolting colonies were more than mere oratory. 
John Bright, another kind friend in troubled days, had one too. He 
always said Bor dox and Calass. 


X. 


PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA 

1 . 

Surnames 

On October 20, 1919, Mr. Mondell, of Wyoming, the majority 
leader, arose in the House of Representatives and called the atten¬ 
tion of the House to the presence in the gallery of a detachment of 27 
soldiers, “popularly known by the appropriate title and designation 
of ‘Americans all.’ ” A few moments later Mr. Wilson, of Con¬ 
necticut, had the names of these soldiers spread upon the record for 
the day. Here they are: 

Pedro Araez 
Sylvester Balchunaa 
Arezio Aurechio 
Jules Boutin 
Oasge Christiansen 
Kusti Franti 
Odilian Gosselin 
Walter Hucko 
Argele Intili 
Henry Jurk 
David King 
John Klok 
Norman Kerman 
Eugene Kristiansen 

This was no unusual group of Americans, though it was deliber¬ 
ately assembled to convince Congress of the existence of a “melting 
pot that really melts.” I turn to the list of promotions in the army 
sent in to the Senate on the first day of the Harding administration, 
and find Lanza, Huguet, Shaffer, Brambila, Straat, Knabenshue, De 
Armond, Meyer, Wiezorek and Stahl among the new colonels and lieu- 

329 


Frank Kristopoulos 
Johannes Lenferink 
Fidel Martin 
Attilio Marzi 
Gurt Mistrioty 
Michael Myatowych 
Francisco Pungi 
Joseph Rossignol 
Ichae Semos 
Joe Shestak 
George Strong 
Hendrix Svennigsen 
Fritz Wold 


330 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


tenant-colonels, and Ver, Lorch, von Deesten, Violland and Armat 
among the new majors. I proceed to the roll of the Sixty-sixth Con¬ 
gress and find Babka, Bacharach, Baer, Chindblom, Crago, Dwpre, 
Esch, Focht, Goldfogel, Goodykoontz, Hernandez, Hoch, Juul, Kahn, 
Keller, Kiess, Kleczka, Knutson, Kraus, Larsen, Lazaro, Lehlbach, 
Rodenherg, Romjue, Siegel, Steenerson, Volk, Volstead, Voigt and 
Zihlman in the House. I go on to the list of members of the Na¬ 
tional Institute of Arts and Letters (1919) and find Cortissoz, de 
Kay, Gummere, Lefevre, Schelling, van Dyke and Wister among the 
writers, and Baltin, Betts, Brunner, Carlsen, De Camp, Dielman, 
Du Mond, Guerin, Henri, Jaegers, La Farge, Niehaus, Ochtman, 
Roth, Volk and Weinman among the painters and sculptors. I con¬ 
clude with a glance through “Who’s Who in America.” There are 
Aasgaard, Abbe, Abt, Ackerman, Adler, Agassiz, Agee, Allaire, Als- 
berg, Alschuler, Althoff, Althouse, Ament, Amstutz, Amweg, 
Andrus, Angellotti, Anshutz, Anspaclier, Anstadt, App, Arndt, Auer, 
Auerbach, Ault and Auman, to go no further than the A’s—all 
“notable living men and women of the United States” and all native- 
born. 

Practically any other list of Americans would show many names 
of the same sort. Indeed, every American telephone directory of¬ 
fers plenty of evidence that, despite the continued political and cul¬ 
tural preponderance of the original English strain, the American peo¬ 
ple have quite ceased to bo authentically English in race, or even, 
as a London weekly has said, “predominantly of British stock.” 1 
The blood in their arteries is inordinately various and inextricably 
mixed, but yet not mixed enough to run a clear stream. A touch of 
foreignness still lingers about millions of them, even in the country 
of their birth. They show their alien origin in their speech, in their 
domestic customs, in their habits of mind, and in their very names. 
Just as the Scotch and the Welsh have invaded England, elbowing out 
the actual English to make room for themselves, so the Irish, the Ger¬ 
mans, the Italians, the Scandinavians and the Jews of Eastern Eu¬ 
rope, and in some areas, the French, the Slavs and the hybrid-Span- 
iards have elbowed out the descendants of the first colonists. It is 
no exaggeration, indeed, to say that wherever the old stock comes into 
1 Nation, March 12, 1912. 


PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA 


331 


direct and unrestrained conflict with one of these new stocks, it tends 
to succumb, or, at all events, to give up the battle. The Irish, in the 
big cities of the East, attained to a truly impressive political power 
long before the first native-born generation of them had grown up. 2 
The Germans, following the limestone bolt of the Alleghany foothills, 
pre-empted the best lands East of the mountains before the new re¬ 
public was born. And so in our own time we have seen the Swedes 
and Norwegians shouldering the native from the wheat lands of the 
Northwest, and the Italians driving the decadent New Englanders 
from their farms, and the Jews gobbling New York, and the Slavs 
getting a firm foothold in the mining regions, and the French Cana¬ 
dians penetrating New Hampshire and Vermont, and the Japanese 
and Portuguese menacing Hawaii, and the awakened negroes grad¬ 
ually ousting the whites from the farms of the South. 3 The birth¬ 
rate among all these foreign stocks is enormously greater than among 
the older stock, and though the death-rate is also high, the net in¬ 
crease remains relatively formidable. Even without the aid of im¬ 
migration it is probable that they .would continue to rise in numbers 
faster than the original English and so-called Scotch-Irish. 4 

Turn to the letter z in the New York telephone directory and 
you will find a truly astonishing array of foreign names, some of 
them in process of anglicization, but many of them still arrestingly 
outlandish. The only Anglo-Saxon surname beginning with z is 
Zacharias 5 and even that was originally borrowed from the Greek. 
To this the Norman invasion seems to have added only Zouchy. But 
in Manhattan and the Bronx, even among the necessarily limited 
class of telephone subscribers, there aro nearly 1500 persons whoso 
names begin with the letter, and among them one finds fully 150 dif¬ 
ferent surnames. The German Zimmermann, with either one n or 
two, is naturally the most numerous single name, and following close 
upon it are its relatives, Zimmer and Zimmern. With them are 
many more German names, Zahn, Zechendorf, Zcfjert, Zeitler, 

2 The great Irish famine, which launched the chief emigration to America, 
extended from 1845 to 1847. The Know Nothing movement, which was chielly 
aimed at the Irish, extended from 1852 to I860. 

J Richard T. Ely: Chitlines of Economics, 3rd rev. ed.; New York, 1916, p. 68. 

* Cf. Seth K. Humphrey: Mankind; New York, 1917, p. 45. 

5 Cf. William Q. Searle: Onomasticon Anglo-Saxonicum; Cambridge, 1897. 


332 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


Zeller, Zellner, Zeltmacher, Zepp, Ziegfeld, Zabel, ZucJcer, Zucker- 
mann, Ziegler, Zillman, Zinser and so on. They are all represented 
heavily, but they indicate neither the earliest nor the most formidable 
accretion, for underlying them are many Dutch names, e. g., Zeeman, 
and over them are a large number of Slavic, Italian and Jewish 
names. Am ong the first I note Zabludosky, Zachczynski, Zapinkow, 
Zaretsky, Zechnomtz, Zenzalsky and Zywachevsky ; among the 
second, Zaccardi, Zaccarini, Zaccaro, Zapparano, Zanelli, Zicarelli 
and Zucca; among the third, Zukor, Zipkin and Ziskind. There 
are, too, various Spanish names: Zalaya, Zingaro, etc. And Greek: 
Zapeion, Zarvakos and Zouvelekis. And Armenian: Zaloom, Zaron 
and Zatmajian. And Hungarian: Zadek, Zagor and Zichy. And 
Swedish: Z etterholm and Zetterlund. And a number that defy plac¬ 
ing: Zrike, Zvan , 6 Zwipf, Zula, Zur and Zeve. 

In the Hew York city directory the fourth most common name is 
now Murphy, an Irish name, and the fifth most common is Meyer, 
which is German and often Jewish. The Meyers are the Smiths of 
Austria, and of most of Germany. They outnumber all other clans. 
After them come the Schultzes and Krauses, just as the Joneses and 
'Williamses follow the Smiths in Great Britain. Schultze and Kraus 
do not seem to be very common names in Hew York, but Schmidt, 
Muller, Schneider and Klein appear among the fifty commonest . 7 
Cohen and Levy rank eighth and ninth, and are both ahead of Jones, 
which is second in England, and Williams, which is third. Taylor, a 
highly typical British name, ranking fourth in England and Wales, 
is twenty-third in Hew York. Ahead of it, beside Murphy, Meyer, 
Cohen and Levy, are Schmidt, Ryan, O'Brien, Kelly and Sullivan. 
Robinson, which is twelfth in England, is thirty-ninth in Hew York; 
even Schneider and Muller are ahead of it. In Chicago Olson, 
Schmidt, Meyer, Hansen and Larsen are ahead of Taylor, and Hoff¬ 
man and Becker are ahead of Ward; in Boston Sullivan and Murphy 
are ahead of any English name save Smith; in Philadelphia Myers 
is just below Robinson. Hor, as I have said, is this great proliferation 
of foreign surnames confined to the large cities. There are whole 

8 A correspondent suggests that Zvan may be a misprint for Ivan. But what 
of the other strange names in the group? 

T World, Almanac, 1914, p. 668. 




PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA 


333 


regions in the Southwest in which Lopez and Gonzales ace far com¬ 
moner names than Smith, Brown or Jones, and whole regions in 
the Middle West wherein Olson is commoner than either Taylor or 
Williams, and places both North and South where Duval is at least 
as common as Brown. 

Moreover, the true proportions of this admixture of foreign blood 
are partly concealed by a wholesale anglicization of surnames, some¬ 
times deliberate and sometimes the fruit of mere confusion. That 
Smith, Brown and Miller remain in first, second and third places 
among the surnames of New York is surely no sound evidence of 
Anglo-Saxon survival. The German and Scandinavian Schmidt has 
undoubtedly contributed many a Smith, and Braun many a Brown, 
and Muller many a Miller. In the same way Johnson, which holds 
first place among Chicago surnames, and Anderson, which holds third, 
are plainly reinforced from Scandinavian sources, and the former 
may also owe something to the Russian Ivanof. Miller is a relatively 
rare name in England; it is not among the fifty most common. But 
it stands thirtieth in Boston, third in New York, fourth in Baltimore, 
and second in Philadelphia . 8 In the last-named city the influence of 
Muller, probably borrowed from the Pennsylvania German, is plainly 
indicated, and in Chicago it is likely that there are also contributions 
from the Scandinavian Moiler, the Polish Jannszewski and the Bo¬ 
hemian Mlinar. Myers, as we have seen, is a common surname in 
Philadelphia. So are Fox and Snyder. In some part, at least, they 
have been reinforced by the Pennsylvania German Myer, Fuchs and 
Schneider. Sometimes Muller changes to Miller, sometimes to Mul¬ 
ler, and sometimes it remains unchanged, but with the spelling made 
Mueller. Muller and Mueller do not appear among the commoner 
names in Philadelphia; nearly all the Mullers seem to have become 
Millers, thus putting Miller in second place. But in Chicago, with 
Miller in fourth place, there is also Mueller in thirty-first place, and 
in New York, with Miller in third place, there is also Midler in 
twenty-fourth place. 

Such changes, chiefly based upon transliterations, are met with in 

8 It was announced by the Bureau of War Risk Insurance on March 30, 1918, 
that there were then 15,000 Millers in the United States Army. On the same 
day there were 262 John J. O’Briens, of whom 50 had wives named Mary. 



334 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


all countries. The name of Taaffe, familiar in Austrian history, 
had an Irish prototype, probably Taft. General Demikof, one of 
the Russian commanders at the battle of Zomdorf, in 1758, was a 
Swede born Themicoud, and no doubt the founder of the house in 
Sweden was bom a Frenchman. Franz Maria von Thugut, the 
Austrian diplomatist, was a member of an Italian Tyrolese family 
named Tunicotto. This became Thunichgut (= do no good) in 
Austria, and was changed to Thugut (= do good ) to bring it into 
greater accord with its possessor’s deserts. 9 In Bonaparte the Italian 
buon(o) became the French bon. Many English surnames are de¬ 
cayed forms of 1STorman-French names, for example, Sidney from St. 
Denis, Divver from De Vere, Bridgewater from Burgh de Walter, 
Garnett from Guarinot, and Seymour from Saint-Maure. A 
large number of so-called Irish names are the products of 
rough-and-ready transliterations of Gaelic patronymics, for ex¬ 
ample, Findlay from Fionnlagh, Dermott from Diarmuid, and 
McLane from Mac llleathiain. In the same way the name of 
Phoenix Park, in Dublin, came from Fion Uisg (= fine water). 
Of late some of the more ardent Irish authors and politicians 
have sought to return to the originals. Thus, O’ Sullivan has 
become 0 Suilleabhdin, Pearse has become Piarais, Shields has 
become O’Sheet, Mac Sweeney has become Mac Suibhne, and Patrick 
has suffered a widespread transformation to Padraic. But in Amer¬ 
ica, with a language of peculiar vowel-sounds and even consonant- 
sounds struggling against a foreign invasion unmatched for strength 
and variety, such changes have been far more numerous than across 
the ocean, and the legal rule of idem sonans is of much wider utility 
than anywhere else in the world. If it were not for that rule there 
would be endless difficulties for the Wises whose grandfathers were 
Weisses, and the Leonards bom Leonhards, Leonhardts or Lehnerts, 
and the Manneys who descend and inherit from Le Maines. 

“A crude popular etymology,” says a leading authority on sur¬ 
names, 10 “often begins to play upon a name that is no longer sig¬ 
nificant to the many. So the Thurgods have become Thoroughgoods, 
and the Todenackers have become the Pennsylvania Dutch Tooth- 

8 Cf. Carlyle’s Frederick the Great, bk. xxi, ch. vi. 

10 S. Grant Oliphant, in the Baltimore Sun, Dec. 2, 1906. 


PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA 


335 


akers, much as asparagus has become sparrow-grass.” So, too, the 
Wittenachts of Boyle county, Kentucky, descendants of a Hollander, 
have become Whitenecks, and the Lehns of lower Pennsylvania, 
descendants of some far-off German, have become Lanes. 11 The 
original Herkimer in New York was a Herchheimer; the original 
Waldo in New England was a German named Waldow. Edgar Allan 
Poe was a member of a family long settled in Western Maryland, 
the founder being one Poh or Pfau, a native of the Palatinate. 
Major George Armistead, who defended Fort McHenry in 1814, 
when Francis Scott Key wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner,” was 
the descendant of an Armstadt who came to Virginia from Hesse- 
Darmstadt. General George A. Custer, the Indian fighter, was the 
great-grandson of one Kuster, a Hessian soldier paroled after Bur- 
goyne’s surrender. William Wirt, anti-Masonic candidate for the 
presidency in 1832, was the son of one Worth. William Paca, a 
signer of the Declaration of Independence, was the great-grandson 
of a Bohemian named Paka. General J. J. Pershing is the de¬ 
scendant of an Alsatian named Pfoersching, who immigrated to 
America in the eighteenth century; the name was at first debased to 
Per shin; in 1838 the final g was restored. General W. S. Rosecrans 
was really a Rosenkrantz. Even the surname of Abraham Lincoln, 
according to some authorities, was an anglicized form of the German 
Linkhom. 12 

Such changes, in fact, are almost innumerable; every work upon 
American genealogy is full of examples. The first foreign names 
to undergo the process were Dutch and French. Among the former, 
Reiger was debased to Riker, Van de Veer to Vandiver, Van Huys 
to Vannice, Van Siegel to Van Sickel, Van Arsdale to Vannersdale, 
and Haerlen (or Haerlem) to Harlan ; 13 among the latter, Petit be¬ 
came Poteet, Caille changed to Kyle, De la Haye to Dillehay, 
Dejean to Deshong, Guizor to Gossett, Guereant to Caron, Soule to 
Sewell, Gervaise to Jarvis, Bayle to Bailey, Fontaine to Fountain, 

u Harriet Lane Johnston was of this family. Many other examples are to 
be found in the pages of the Pennsylvania-German Magazine, especially in the 
“Meaning of Names” department conducted by Dr. Leonard Felix Fuld. 

13 Cf. Faust, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 183-4. See also A Few Bausman Letters, by 
Lottie M. Bausman, Pennsylvania-German Magazine, April, 1910, p. 229. 

13 A Tragedy of Surnames, by Fayette Dunlap, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. 1, 
1913, pp. 7-8. 


336 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


Denis to Denny, Pebaudiere to Peabody, Bon Pas to Bumpus and 
de VHotel to Doolittle. “Frenchmen and French Canadians who 
came to New England,” says Scheie de Vere, “had to pay for such 
hospitality as they there received by the sacrifice of their names. The 
brave Bon Cosur, Captain Marryatt tells us in his Diary, became Mr. 
Bunker, and gave his name to Bunker’s Hill.” 14 But it was the Ger¬ 
man immigration that provoked the first really wholesale slaughter. 
A number of characteristic German sounds—for example, that of u 
and the guttural in ch and g —are almost impossible to the Anglo- 
Saxon pharynx, and so they had to go. Thus, Bloch was changed to 
Block or Black, Ochs to Oakes, Hoch to Hoke, Fischbach to Fishback, 
Albrecht to Albert or Albright, and Steinweg to Steinway, and the 
Grundwort, bach, was almost universally changed to baugh or paugh, 
as in Brumbaugh and Fishpaugh (or Fishpaw). The u met the same 
fate: Griln was changed to Green, Sanger to Sanger or Singer, 
Gluck to Gluck, Fuhr to Fear or Fuhr, Warner to Warner, During to 
Deering, and Schnabele to Snabely, Snavely or Snively. In many 
other cases there were changes in spelling to preserve vowel sounds 
differently represented in German and English. Thus, Blum was 
changed to Bloom , 15 Reuss to Royce, Koester to Kester, Kuehle to 
Keeley, Schroeder to Schrader, Stehli to Staley, Weymann. to Way- 
man, Klein to Kline or Cline, Federlein to Federline, Friedmann to 
Freedman, Bauman to Bowman, Braun to Brown, and Lang (as the 
best compromise possible) to Long. The change of Oehm to Ames 
belongs to the same category; the addition of the final s represents a 
typical effort to substitute the nearest related Anglo-Saxon name or 
name so sounding. Other examples of that effort are to be found in 
Michaels for Michaelis, Bowers for Bauer, Johnson for Johannsen, 
Ford for Furth, Hines for Heintz, Kemp for Kempf, Foreman for 
Fuhrmann, Kuhns or Coons for Kuntz, Hoover for Huber, Levering 
for Liebering, Jones for Jonas, Redwood for Rothholz, Grosscup for 
Grosskopf, Westfall for Westphal, Kemgood for Kemgut, Collenberg 
for Kaltenberg, Cronkhite for Krankheit, Betts for Betz, Penny- 

14 Americanisms, p. 112. 

15 Henry Harrison, in his Dictionary of the Surnames of the United King¬ 
dom; London, 1912, shows that such names as Bloom, Cline, etc., always 
represent transliterations of German names. They are unknown to genuinely 
British nomenclature. 


PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA 


337 


packer for Pfannenbecker, Crile for Kreil , 16 Swope for Schwab, Hite 
or Hyde for Heid, Andrews for Andre, Young for Jung, Goody- 
koontz for Gutekuntz, and Pence for Pentz . 11 

The American antipathy to accented letters, mentioned in the 
chapter on spelling, is particularly noticeable among surnames. An 
immigrant named Furst inevitably becomes plain Furst in the United 
States, and if not the man, then surely his son. Lowe, in the same 
way, is transformed into Lowe (pro. low ), 18 Lurmann into Lurman, 
Schon into Schon or Shane, Gunther into Ginter, Suplee into Suplee 
or Supplee, Luders into Luders, and Brilhl into Brill. Even when no 
accent betrays it, the foreign diphthong is under hard pressure. Thus 
the German oe disappears and Loeb is changed to Lobe or Laib, Oehler 
to Ohler, Loeser to Leser, and Schoen to Schon or Shane. In the 
same way the au in such names as Rosenau changes to aw . 19 So too, 
the French oi-sound is disposed of, and Dubois is pronounced Doo- 
boys and Boileau acquires a first syllable rhyming with toil. So 
with the kn in the German names of the Knapp class; they are nearly 
all pronounced, probably by analogy with Knight, as if 
they began with n. So with sch; Schneider becomes Snyder, 
Schlegel becomes Slagel, and Schluter becomes Sluter. If 
a foreigner clings to the original spelling of his name he must 
usually expect to hear it mispronounced. Roth, in American, 
quickly becomes Rawth, Ranft is pronounced Ranf; Fremont, 
losing both accent and the French e, becomes Freemont; the 

18 1 suggest that the eminent American surgeon, George W. Crile, may be a 
descendant of some early Kreil. His mother’s name was Deeds. During the 
World War, when an American officer named.Deeds was under attack, it was 
alleged that the original form of his name was Dietz. 

17 A great many more such transliterations and modifications are listed by 
Faust, op. cit., particularly in his first volume. Others are in Pennsylvania 
Dutch’ by S. S. Haldemann; London, 1872, p. 60 et seq., and in The Origin of 
Pennsylvania Surnames, by L. Oscar Kuhns, Lippincott's Magazine, March, 
1897, p. 395. 

18 1 lately encountered the following sign in front of an automobile repair 
shop: 

For puncture or blow 
Bring it to Lowe. 

ia It is to be noted as rather curious that Kraus never shows this change. 
Kraws is almost unheard of. Perhaps this is because Kraus is one of the most 
common of German names, and Americans have heard it so often that they 
have learned how to pronounce it correctly. 




338 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


names in -that take the English th sound; 20 Blum begins to rhyme 
with dumb; Mann rhymes with van, and Lang with hang; Krantz, 
Lantz and their cognates with chance; Kurtz with shirts; the first 
syllable of Gutmann with but; the first of Kohler with bay; the first 
of Werner with turn; the first of Wagner with nag. Uhler, in 
America, is always Youter. Berg loses its German e-sound for an 
English u-sound, and its German hard g for an English g; it becomes 
identical with the berg of iceberg. The same change in the vowel 
occurs in Erdmann. In Konig the German diphthong succumbs to a 
long o, and the hard g becomes h; the common pronunciation is 
Cone-ik. Often, in Berger, the g becomes soft, and the name rhymes 
with verger. It becomes soft, too, in Bittinger. In Wilstaeh and 
Welsbach the ch becomes a Jc. In Baruch, the a, the u and the ch 
are all changed, and the name becomes Bare-ooh, with a flat a. 
In Anheuser the eu changes to ow or li. The final e, important 
in German, is nearly always silenced; Dohme rhymes with 
foam; Kuhne becomes keen. In the collectanea of Judge J. 
C. Ruppenthal, of Russell, Kansas, a very careful observer, 
are many curious specimens. He finds Vierech transformed into 
Fearhake, Vogelgesang into Fogelsong, Pfannenstiel into Fanestil, 
Pfluger into Phlegar, Pfeil into Feil, and Steinmetz into Stimits. 
The Bohemian Hrdlicka becomes Herdlichlca. The Dutch Broywer 
(in Michigan, where there are many Hollanders of relatively recent 
immigration) becomes Brower, Pelgrim becomes Pilgrim, Pyp be¬ 
comes Pipe, Londen becomes London, Poos becomes Rose, and Wijn- 
gaarden becomes Winegar. 

In addition to these transliterations, there are constant translations 
of foreign proper names. “Many a Pennsylvania Carpenter,” says 
Dr. Oliphant , 21 “bearing a surname that is English, from the French, 
trom the Latin, and there a Celtic loan-word in origin, is neither 
English, nor French, nor Latin, nor Celt, but an original German 
Zimmermann.” 22 A great many other such translations are under 

20 In the case of Rosenthal a new consonant has been invented in America. 
It is the th of thick but with a distinct t-sound preceding. The name, as 
pronounced, often sounds like Rosent-thal. The same tth is sometimes heard in 
Thalheimer. 

21 Baltimore Sun, March 17, 1907. 

22 Cf. The Origin of Pennsylvania Surnames, op. cit. 


PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA 


339 


everyday observation. Pfund becomes Pound; Becker, Baker; 
Schumacher, Shoemaker; Konig, King; Weissberg, Whitehill; Koch, 
Cook; 23 Neumann, Newman; Schaefer, Shepherd or Sheppard; Gut- 
mann, Goodman; Goldschmidt, Goldsmith; Edelstein, Nobelstone; 
Steiner, Stoner; Meister, Master(s ); Schwartz, Black; Weiss, 
White; Kurtz, Short; Stem, Starr; Morgenstem, Momingstar; 
Weber, Weaver; Bucher, Booker; Vogelgesang, Birdsong; Sonntag, 
Sunday, and so on. It is not unusual for some members of a 
family to translate'the patronymic while others leave it unchanged. 
Thus in Pennsylvania (and no doubt elsewhere) there are Carpen¬ 
ters and Zimmermans of the same blood. A Frenchman named 
LeRoi settled in the Mohawk Valley in the early eighteenth century; 
today his descendants are variously named Leroy, Larraway and 
King. Partial translations are also encountered, e. g., Studebaker 
from Studebecker, and Reindollar from Rheinthaler, and radical 
shortenings, e. g., Swiler from Lebenschweiler, Kirk from Kirkes- 
lager, and Castle (somewhat fantastically) from Katzenellenbogen. 
The same processes show themselves in the changes undergone by the 
names of the newer immigrants. The Hollanders in Michigan often 
have to submit to translations of their surnames. Thus Hoogsteen 
becomes Highstone, Veldhuis becomes Fieldhouse, Huisman becomes 
Houseman, Prins becomes Prince, Kuiper becomes Cooper, Dykhuis 
becomes Dykehouse, Konig becomes King, Werkman becomes Work¬ 
man, Nieuwhuis becomes Newliouse, and Christiaanse becomes Chris¬ 
tians. Similarly the Greek Triantafyllopoulos (signifying rose ) is 
often turned into the English Rose, Giannopoulos becomes Johnson, 
and Demetriades becomes Jameson. So, too, Constantinopoulos is 
shortened to Constant or Constantine, Athanasios to Nathan or A than, 
Pappadakis, Pappadopoulos or Pappademetriou to Pappas. Trans¬ 
literation also enters into the matter, as in the change from Mylonas 
to Miller, from Demopoulos to DeMoss, and from Christides to 
Christie. 2 * And so, by one route or another, the Polish Wilkiewicz 

23 Kooh, a common German name, has very hard sledding in America. Its 
correct pronunciation is almost impossible to Americans; at best it becomes 
Coke. Hence it is often changed, not only to Cook, but to Cox, Koke or even 
Cockey. 

24 For the Dutch examples, I am indebted to Prof. Henry J. G. Van Andel, of 
Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Micb., and to Prof. B. K. Kuiper, of the same 


340 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


becomes Wilson, the Scandinavian Knutson becomes Newton, tbe Bo¬ 
hemian Bohumil becomes Godfrey, and the Bohemian Kovdr and the 
Russian Kuznetzov become Smith. Some curious examples are occa¬ 
sionally encountered, particularly among the Italians of the big cities. 
The late James E. March, Republican leader of the Third Assembly 
District in Hew York, was originally Antonio Maggio. Paul Kelly, 
leader of the Longshoremen’s Union, was Paolo Vaccarelli. One 
Alessandro Smiraglia has become Sandy Smash, Francesco Napoli is 
Frank Knapp, Francesco Tomasini is Frank Thomas, and Luigi 
Zampariello is Louis Smith. Henry Woodhouse, a gentleman prom¬ 
inent in aeronautical affairs, came to the United States from Italy 
as Mario Terenzio Enrico Casalegno; his new surname is simply a 
translation of his old one. The Belmonts, unable to find a eu¬ 
phonious English equivalent for their German patronymic 
of Schonberg, chose a French one that Americans could pronounce. 
Edmund Burke Fairfield, once chancellor of the University of 
Nebraska, was the descendant of a Frenchman named Beauchamp, 
who came to America in 1639. 

In part, as I have said, these changes in surname are enforced by 
the sheer inability of Americans to pronounce certain Continental 
consonants, and their disinclination to remember the Continental 
vowel sounds. Many an immigrant, finding his name constantly 
mispronounced, changes its vowels or drops some of its consonants; 
many another shortens it, or translates it, or changes it entirely for 
the same reason. Just as a well-known Greek-French poet changed 
his Greek name of Papadiamantopoulos to Moreas because Papadiar 
mantopoulos was too much for Frenchmen, and as an eminent Polish- 
English novelist changed his Polish name of Korzeniowski to Conrad 
because few Englishmen could pronounce owski correctly, so the 
Italian or Greek or Slav immigrant, coming up for naturalization, 
very often sheds his family name with his old allegiance, and. emerges, 
as Taylor, Jackson or Wilson. I once encountered a firm of Polish 
Jews, showing the name of Robinson & Jones on its sign-board, 
whose partners were born Rubinowitz and Jonas. I lately heard of a 
German named Knoche —a name doubly difficult to Americans, what 

city. The Greek examples come from Mr. S. S. Lontos, editor of Atlantis, the 
Greek daily newspaper in New York. 


PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA 


341 


with the Jen and the ch —who changed it boldly to Knox to avoid 
being called NoJcky. A Greek named Papademetracopoulos, Harzir 
dalcis, Papalhesdoros, Sakorrhaphos, Jouphexes or Oikonomakes 
would find it practically impossible to carry on amicable business 
with Americans; his name would arouse their mirth, if not their 
downright ire. And the same burden would lie upon a Hungarian 
named Beniczkyne, or Gyalui, or Szilagyi. Or a Finn named 
KyyhJeysen, or Jadskelainen, or Tuulensuu, or Uotinen, —all 
honorable Finnish patronymics. Or a Swede named Sjogren, 
or Leijonhufvud. Or a Bohemian named Srb, or HrubJca. Or a 
Hollander named Zylstra, or Pyp, or Hoogsteen. Or, for that mat¬ 
ter, a German named Kannengiesser, or Schnapaupf, or Pfannen- 
beclcer. 

But more important than this purely linguistic hostility, there is a 
deeper social enmity, and it urges the immigrant to change his name 
with even greater force. For a hundred years past all the heaviest and 
most degrading labor of the ‘United States has been done by suc¬ 
cessive armies of foreigners, and so a concept of inferiority has 
come to be attached to mere foreignness. In addition, these new¬ 
comers, pressing upward steadily in the manner already described, 
have offered the native a formidable, and considering their lower 
standards of living, what has appeared to him to be an unfair com¬ 
petition on his own plane, and as a result a hatred bom of disastrous 
rivalry has been added to contempt. Our unmatchable vocabulary 
of derisive names for foreigners reveals the national attitude. The 
French boclie, the German hunyadi (for Hungarian), 25 and the old 
English frog or froggy (for Frenchman) seem lone and feeble beside 
our great repertoire: dago, wop, guinea, hike, goose, mick, harp, 20 
bohick, bohee, bohunk, heinie, square-head, greaser, canuck, spig- 

25 This is army slang, but promises to survive. The Germans, during the 
war, had no opprobrious nicknames for their foes. The French were usually 
simply die Franzosen, the English were die Englander, and so on, even when 
most violently abused. Even der Yankee was rare. Teufelhunde (devil-dogs), 
for the American marines, was invented by an American correspondent; the 
Germans never used it. Cf. Wie der Feldgraue spricht, by Karl Bergmann; 
Giessen, 1916, p. 23. 

M Cf. Some Current Substitutes for Irish, by W. A. McLaughlin, Dialect 
Notes, vol. iv, pt. ii. 


342 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


goty 27 spick, clunk, polack, duicliie, skibby, 28 scowegian, hunkie and 
yellow-belly. This disdain tends to pursue an immigrant with 
extraordinary rancor when he bears a name that is unmistakably 
foreign and hence difficult to the native, and open to his crude 
burlesque. Moreover, the general feeling penetrates the man himself, 
particularly if he be ignorant, and he comes to believe that his name 
is not only a handicap, but also intrinsically discreditable—that it 
wars subtly upon his worth and integrity. 29 This feeling, perhaps, 
accounted for a good many changes of surnames among Germans 
and Jews of German name upon the entrance of the United States 
into the war. But in the majority of cases, of course, the changes so 
copiously reported— e. g., from Bielefelder to Benson, and from 
Pulvermacher to Pullman —were merely efforts at protective colora¬ 
tion. The immigrant, in a time of extraordinary suspicion and 
difficulty, tried to get rid of at least one handicap. 30 

37 Spiggoty, of which spick is a variant, originated at Panama and now means 
a native of any Latin-American region under American protection, and in 
general any Latin-American. It is navy slang, but has come into extensive 
civilian use. It is a derisive daughter of “No spik Inglese.” 

38 This designates a Japanese and is apparently used only on the Pacific Coast. 
It originally meant a Japanese loose woman, but is now applied to all persons 
of the race. Tucker says that dago goes back to 1832. It is probably a cor¬ 
ruption of Diego; it was first applied to Mexicans. The etymologies of loop, 
guinea and kike are' uncertain, and frequently disputed. Often efforts are made 
to discourage the use of these nicknames. Dr. P. P. Claxton, United States 
Commissioner of Education, devised in 1919 a Code of Honorable Names to be 
subscribed to by the Boy Scouts, whereby they agreed to avoid them. But Dr. 
Claxton omitted all the opprobrious names for the negroes, and the fact brought 
forth a protest from them. See Offensive Nicknames, by James W. Johnson, 
New York Age, Feb. 1, 1919. 

39 Cf. Reaction to Personal Names, by Dr. C. P. Oberndorf, Psychoanalytic 
Review, vol. v, no. 1, January, 1918, p. 47 et seq. This, so far as I know, is 
the only article in English which deals with the psychological effects of sur¬ 
names upon their bearers. Abraham, Silberer and other German psychoanalysts 
have made contributions to the subject. Dr. Oberndorf alludes, incidentally, 
to the positive social prestige which goes with an English air or a French air 
in America. He tells of an Italian who changed his patronymic of Dipucoi 
into de Pucci to make it more “aristocratic.” And of a German bearing the 
genuinely aristocratic name of von Landsschaffshausen who changed it to “a 
typically English name” because the latter seemed more distinguished to his 
neighbors. Why is a French surname regarded as aristocratic in America? 
The question has never been investigated. 

30 The effects of race antagonism upon language are still to be investigated. 
The etymology of slave indicates that the inquiry might yield interesting 
results. The word French, in English, is largely used to suggest sexual per¬ 
version. In German anything Russian is barbarous, and English education hints 
at flagellation. The French, for many years, called a certain contraband appli¬ 
ance a capote Anglaise, but after the entente cordiale they changed the name to 
oapote Allemande. The common English name to this day is French letter. Cf. 




PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA 


343 


This motive constantly appears among the Jews, who face an 
anti-Semitism that is imperfectly concealed and may be expected to 
grow stronger hereafter. Once they have lost the faith of their 
fathers, a phenomenon almost inevitable in the first native-born 
generation, they shrink from all the disadvantages that go with Jew¬ 
ishness, and seek to conceal their origin, or, at all events, to avoid 
making it unnecessarily noticeable. 31 To this end they modify the 
spelling of the more familiar Jewish surnames, turning Levy into 
Lewy, Lewyt, Levitt, Halevy, Levay, Levie, Levene, Levien, Levin, 
Levine, Levey, Levie 32 and even Lever; Cohen into Cohn, 
Cahn, Kahn, Kann, Coyne and Conn; Aarons into Arens and 
Ahrens, and Solomon into Salmon, Salomon and Solmson . 33 
In the same way they shorten their long names, changing 
Wolfsheimer to Wolf, Goldschmidt to Gold, and Rosenblatt, Rosen¬ 
thal, Rosenbaum, Rosenau, Rosenberg, Rosenbusch, Rosenblum, Ro- 
senstein, Rosengarten, Rosenheim and Rosenfeldt to Rose or Ross. 3i 
Like the Germans, they also seek refuge in translations more or less 
literal. Thus, on the East Side of New York, Blumenthal is often 
changed to Bloomingdale, Schneider to Taylor, Reichman to Rich- 
man, and Schlachtfeld to Warfield. One Lobenstine (t. e., Loben- 
stein ) had his name changed to Preston during the war, and an¬ 
nounced that this was “the English version” of his patronymic. A 
Wolfsohn similarly became a Wilson, though without attempting any 

The Criminal, by Havelock Ellis; London, 1910, p. .208. In France a sharper 
is called a Greek, as drunk as a Pole is a common phrase, and one of the main¬ 
stays of low comedy is le true du bresilien. See Xenophobia, by Rufino Blanco- 
Fombona, in his La Lampara de Aladino, pp. 431-440. In most of the non- 
Prussian parts of Germany cockroaches are called Preussen; in Prussia they 
are Franzosen; in some places they are Schnvaben. Finally, it will be recalled 
that Benvenuto Cellini, in his autobiography, says that he was accused in a 
French court of using one of his mistresses in “the Italian manner.” 

31 Cf. The Jews, by Maurice Fishberg; New York, 1911, ch. xxii, and espe¬ 
cially p. 485 ff. 

32 The English Jews usually change Levy to Lewis, a substitution almost un¬ 
known in America. They also change Abraham to Braham and Moses to Moss. 
Vide Surnames, Their Origin and Nationality, by L. B. McKenna; Quincy (Ill.), 
1913, pp. 13-14. Taylor is another common name among them. Cf. the Jewish 
Encyclopedia, art. Names (Personal), vol. ix, p. 157 ff. 

33 1 lately encountered Openhym in New York, Dalsemer (for Dalsheimer) in 
Philadelphia, and Thalhimer in Richmond, Va. Slessinger and Slazenger are 
common variants of Schlesinger in New York. 

34 See A Cycle of Manhattan, by Thyra Samter Winslow, Smart Set, March, 
1919. In New York I have encountered Schones* transformed into Shamess. 


344 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


such fantastic philological justification for the change, 35 and a 
Bemheimer became a Burton. Fiedler, a common Jewish name, 
often becomes Harper in New York; so does Pikler, which 
is Yiddish for drummer. Stolar, which is a Yiddish word 
borrowed from the Russian, signifying carpenter, is changed to 
Carpenter. Lichtman and Lichtenstein become Chandler. Meilach, 
which is Hebrew for king, becomes King, and so does Meilachson. 
The strong tendency to seek English-sounding equivalents for names 
of noticeably foreign origin changes Sher into Sherman, Michel into 
Mitchell 33 Rogowsky into Rogers, Kolinsky into Collins, Rabinovitch 
into Robbins, Davidovitch into Davis, Moiseyev into Macy or Mason, 
and Jacobson, Jacobovitch and Jacobovsky into Jackson. This last 
change proceeds by way of a transient change to Jake or Jack as a 
nickname. Jacob is always abbreviated to one or the other on the 
East Side. Yankelevitch also becomes Jackson, for Yankel is Yiddish 
for Jacob.* 1 The Jews go further with such changes than any other 
people. They struggle very hard for position, and try to rid them¬ 
selves of every unnecessary handicap. Moreover, they are supported 
by the historical namershedding of a very eminent Jew, the Saul of 
Tarsus who became Paul. In precisely the same way, on attaining 
to 100 per cent Americanism, the Itzik Kolinsky of today becomes 
Sidney Collins. 38 

Among the immigrants of other stocks some extraordinarily radical 
changes in name are also to be observed. Greek names of five, and 
even eight syllables shrink to Smith; Hungarian names that 
are quite impossible to the American are reborn in such 
euphonious forms as Martin and Lacy. I have encountered 
a Gregory who was born Grgurevich in Serbia; a Uhler 

35 1 take the following from Dr. Pepys’ Diary in the Journal of the American 
Medical Association: “Today in ye clinic a tale told of Dr. Levy who hath had 
his name changed to Sullivan. A month after he cometh again to ye court, this 
time wishing to become Kilpatrick. On request for ye reason, he telleth ye 
court that ye patients continually ask of him, ‘What was your name before?’ 
If granted ye change he shall then tell them ‘Sullivan.’ ” 

39 1 once encountered a Mitchell Judge whose original name was Moses 
Richter. 

37 For these observations of name changes among the Jews I am indebted to 
Mr. Abraham Cahan. 

38 Cf. The Gentle Art of Changing Jewish Names, in the International Jew, 
vol. iv, p. 190^.; Dearborn (Mich.), 1922. 


PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA 


345 


who was born UhlyariJc; a Beresford who was bom Bilkovski; 
a Graves who descends from the fine old Dutch family of 
'sGravesande . I once knew a man named Lawton whose grand¬ 
father had been a Lautenberger. First he shed the berger and then 
he changed the spelling of Lauten to make it fit the inevitable Amer¬ 
ican mispronunciation. There is, again, a family of Dicks in the 
South whose ancestor was a Schwettendieck —apparently a Dutch or 
Low German name. There is, yet again, a celebrated American 
artist, of the Bohemian patronymic of Hrubka, who has abandoned 
it for a surname which is common to all the Teutonic languages, and 
is hence easy for Americans. The Italians, probably because of the 
relations established by the Catholic church, often take Irish names, 
as they marry Irish girls; it is common to hear of an Italian pugilist 
or politician named Kelly or O’Brien. The process of change is 
often informal, but even legally it is quite facile. The Naturalization 
Act of June 29,1906, authorizes the court, as a part of the naturaliza¬ 
tion of any alien, to make an order changing his name. This is fre¬ 
quently done when he receives his last papers; sometimes, if the 
newspapers are to be believed, without his solicitation, and even 
against his protest. If the matter is overlooked at the time, he may 
change his name later on, like any other citizen, by simple application 
to a court of record or even without any legal process whatever. 

Among names of Anglo-Saxon origin and names naturalized long 
before the earliest colonization, one notes certain American peculiari¬ 
ties, setting off the nomenclature of the United States from that of 
the mother country. The relative infrequency of hyphenated names 
in America is familiar; when they appear at all it is almost always 
in response to direct English influences. 39 Again, a number of 
English family names have undergone modification in the New 
World. Venable may serve as a specimen. The form in England 

S0 They arose in England through the custom of requiring an heir by the 
female line to adopt the family name on inheriting the family property. For¬ 
merly the heir dropped his own surname. Thus the ancestor of the present 
Duke of Northumberland, born Smithson, took the ancient name of Percy on 
succeeding to the underlying earldom in the eighteenth century. But about a 
hundred years ago, heirs in like case began to join the two names by hyphenation, 
and such names are now very common in the British peerage. Thus the sur¬ 
name of Lord Barrymore is Smith-Barry, that of Lord Vernon is Venables- 
Vemon, and that of the Earl of Wharncliffe is Montagu-Stuart-Wortley- 
Mackenzie. 


346 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


is almost inevitably Venables, but in America tbe final s has been 
lost, and every example of the name that I have been able to find in 
the leading American reference-books is without it. And where 
spellings have remained unchanged, pronunciations have been fre¬ 
quently modified. This is particularly noticeable in the South . 40 
Callowhill, down there, is commonly pronounced Carrol; Crenshawe 
is Granger; Hawthorne, Horton; Heyward, Howard; Norsworthy r 
Nazary; Ironmonger, Munger; Farinholt, Fernall; Camp, Kemp; 
Buchanan, Bohannan; Drewry, Droit; Enroughty, Darby ; 41 and 
Taliaferro, Tolliver. The English Crowninshields commonly make it 
Crunshel. Van Schaick, an old New York Dutch name, is pro¬ 
nounced Von Scoik, though the hard Dutch sh- sound in other New* 
York names, e. g., Schurman, has been softened. A good many 
American Jews, aiming at a somewhat laborious refinement, change 
the pronunciation of the terminal stein in their names so that it 
rhymes, not with line, but with bean. Thus, in fashionable Jewish 
circles, there are no longer any Epsteins, Goldsteins and Hammer- 
steins but only Epsteens, Goldsteens and Hammersteens. The Amer¬ 
ican Jews differ further from the English in pronouncing Levy to 
make the first syllable rhyme with tea; the English Jews always make 
the name Lev-vy, to rhyme with heavy. In general there is a tendency 
in America to throw the accents back, i. e., in such names as Cassels, 
Brennan, Gerard, Doran, Burnett, Maurice, etc. In England the 
first syllable is commonly accented; in the United States, the 
second. This difference is often to be noted in Irish names. In 
Ireland Moran is given an accent on the first syllable; in the United 
States it is always accented on the second. So with Mahony and 
Doheny. Says the Irish critic, E. A. Boyd, who now lives in 
New York: “Sometimes I hear Irish names here that are unrecog¬ 
nizable until I see them written.” 

To match such American prodigies as Darby for Enroughty, the 
English themselves have Hoots for Howells, Sillinger for St. Leger, 

10 B. W. Green: Word-Book of Virginia Folk-Speech; Richmond, 1899, pp. 
13-16. 

41 A correspondent writes in explanation of this amazing pronunciation: “The 
family, having rather unwillingly had to change their name to Enroughty to 
secure an inheritance, balanced up by continuing to pronounce their original 
name— Darby.” 


PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA 


347 


Sinjin for St. John, Weems for Wemyss, Luson-Gore for Leveson- 
Gower, Stubbs for St. Aubyn, Vane for Veheyne, Kerduggen for 
Cadogen, Moboro or Mobrer for Marlborough, Key for Caius, March- 
banks for Marjoribanks, Beecham for Beauchamp, Chumley for 
Cholmondeley, Trosley for Trotterscliffe, and Darby for Derby .* 2 


2 . 


Given Names 

The non-Anglo-Saxon American’s willingness to anglicize his 
patronymic is far exceeded by his eagerness to give “American” 
baptismal names to his children. The favorite given names of the 
old country almost disappear in the first native-born generation. 
The Irish immigrants quickly dropped such names as Terence, 
Dennis and Patrick, and adopted in their places the less conspicuous 
John, George and William. The Germans, in the same way, aban¬ 
doned Otto, August, Hermann, Ludwig, Heinrich, Wolfgang, Al¬ 
brecht, Wilhelm, Kurt, Hans, Rudolf, Gottlieb, Johann and Franz. 
For some of these they substituted the English equivalents: Charles, 
Lewis, Henry, William, John, Frank, and so on. In the room of 
others they began afflicting their offspring with more fanciful native 
names: Milton and Raymond were their chief favorites thirty or 
forty years ago. 43 The Jews carry the thing to great lengths. At 
present they seem to take most delight in Sidney, Irving, Milton, Roy, 
Stanley and Monroe, but they also call their sons John, Charles, 
Henry, Harold, William, Richard, James, Albert, Edward, Alfred, 

43 Vide Who’s Who Year Book for 1917, pp. 74-82. 

43 The one given name that they have clung to is Karl. This, in' fact, has 
been adopted by Americans of other stocks, nearly always, however, spelled 
Carl. Such combinations as Carl Gray, Carl Williams and even Carl Murphy 
are common. Here intermarriage has doubtless had its effect. A variant, 
Karle, has appeared, and I suspect that Carl has helped to popularize Carlo, 
Carlyle and Carleton. Simon Newton (see the World Almanac for 1921, p. 150) 
lately sought to’ determine the most popular American given names by examining 
100,000 names in biographical dictionaries, Army and Navy registers, Masonic 
rosters and the Detroit City Directory. He found that John, William, James, 
George and Charles were the most popular, in the order named, but that Carl 
was thirty-eighth, and ahead of Ernest, Michael, Leans and Hugh, all of which 
would have been far above it on an English list. 



THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


348 

Frederick, Thomas , and even Mark, Luke, and Matthew , 44 and their 
daughters Mary, Gertrude, Estelle, Pauline, Alice and Edith , 45 As a 
boy I went to school with many Jewish boys. The commonest given 
names among them were Isidore, Samuel, Jonas, Isaac and Israel. 
These are seldom bestowed by the rabbis of today. In the same 
school were a good many German pupils, boy and girl. Some of 
the girls bore such fine old German given names as Katharina, Wil- 
helmina, Elsa, Lotta, Ermentrude and Franziska. All these have 
begun to disappear. The Jews have lately shown a great liking for 
Lee, a Southern given name. It has almost displaced Leon, Leonard, 
Levi and Leopold, just as it has been substituted for Li among the 
Chinese. 

The newer immigrants, indeed, do not wait for the birth of 
children to demonstrate their Americanization; they change their own 
given names immediately they land. I am told by Abraham Cahan 
that this is done almost universally on the East Side of New York. 
“Even the most old-fashioned Jews immigrating to this country,” 
he says, “change Yosel to Joseph, Yankel to Jacob, Liebel to Louis, 
Feivel to Philip, Itzik to Isaac, Ruven to Robert, and Moise or Motel 
to Morris.” Moreover, the spelling of Morris, as the position of its 
bearer improves, commonly changes to Maurice, tho gh the pronun¬ 
ciation may main Mawruss, as in the case of Mr. Perlmutter. The 
immigrants of other stocks follow the same habit. The Italian 
Giuseppe quickly becomes Joseph and his brother Francesco is as 
quickly transformed into Frank. The Greek Athanasios is changed 
to Nathan or Tom, Panagiotis to Peter, Constantine to Gus, Demetrios 
to' James, Chasalambos to Charles and Vasilios (Basil) to Bill. 
The Dutch Dirk becomes Dick, Klaas becomes Clarence or Claude, 
Gerrit becomes Garrett or Garritt, Mina becomes Minnie, Neeltje 

44 One recalls Montague Glass’ DeWitt C. Feinberg and Kent J. Goldstein. In 
the New York Telephone Directory I find the following given names borne by 
gentlemen of the name of Cohen: Alexander, Archie, Arthur, Bert, Clarence, 
Davis, De Witt, Edgar, Edward, Edwin, Eliot, Frank, Godfrey, Harold, Harvey, 
Herbert, Irving, Jacques, James, Jerome, John, Julian, Lawrence, Mark, Martin, 
Matthew, Maxwell, Milton, Murry, Nathaniel, Noel, Norman, Oscar, Paul, Philip, 
Ralph, Robert, Sanford. Sidney, Thomas, Victor, Walter, William. 

45 In Berlin, according to the Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. ix, p. 157, Harry is 
now monopolized by the Jews, and so are Jacques and James. .All, it will be 
noted, are non-German names. But two old German names, Ludwig and Julius, 
are also greatly in favor. Cf. N. Pulvermacher: Berliner Vornamen; Berlin, 
1902. 



PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA 


349 


becomes Nellie, Barend becomes Barney, Maarten becomes Martin, 
Arie becomes Arthur, and Douwe becomes Dewey . 46 The Polish 
Stanislav is changed to Stanley, Czeslan to Chester, and Kazimierz to 
Casey 47 Every Bohemian Jaroslav becomes Jerry, every Bronislav 
a Barney, every Stanislav a. Stanley and every Vaclav or Vojtech a 
William . 46 The Hungarians and the Balkan peoples run to Frank, 
John and Joe; the Russians quickly drop their national system of 
nomenclature and give their children names according to the Amer¬ 
ican plan. Even the Chinese laundrymen of the big cities become 
John, George, Charlie and Frank; I once encountered one boasting 
the name of Emil. 

The Puritan influence, in names as in ideas, has remained a good 
deal more potent in America than in England. The given name of 
the celebrated Praise-God Barebone marked a fashion which died 
out in England very quickly, but one still finds traces of it in 
America, e. g., in such women’s names as Faith, Hope, Prudence, 
Charity and Mercy, and in such men’s names as Peregrine . 49 The 
religious obsession of the New England colonists is also kept in 
mind by the persistence of Biblical names: Ezra, Hiram, Ezekiel, 
Zechariah, Elijah, Elihu, and so on. These names excite the derision 
of the English; an American comic character, in an English play or 
novel, always bears one of them. Again, the fashion of using sur¬ 
names as given names is far more widespread in America than in 
England. In this country, indeed, it takes on the character of a 
national habit; fully three out of four eldest sons, in families of 
any consideration, bear their mothers’ surnames as middle names. 
This fashion arose in England during the seventeenth century, and 
one of its fruits was the adoption of such well-known surnames as 
Stanley, Cecil, Howard, Douglas and Duncan as common given 
names. 50 It died out over there during the eighteenth century, and 

44 Here I am again indebted to Mr. S. S. Lontos and to Profs. Van Andel 
and Kuiper. 

47 Kindly communicated by Dr. C. H. Wachtel, editor of the Polish Dziervnick 
Chicagoski. 

48 But I am informed by Judge J. C. Ruppenthal that the Bohemians of Cen¬ 
tral Kansas change Vaclav into James *. 

49 Cf. Curiosities of Puritan Nomenclature, by Charles W. Bardsley; London, 
1880. Such names, of course, were not peculiar to the English Puritans. Cf. 
the German Oottlob, Qottlieb, etc. 

10 Cf. Bardsley, op. oit., p. 205 ff. 


350 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


today the great majority of Englishmen bear such simple given 
names as John, Charles and William —often four or five of them— 
but in America it has persisted. A glance at a roster of the presi¬ 
dents of the United States will show how firmly it has taken root. 
Of the eleven that have had middle names at all, six have had 
middle names that were family surnames, and two of the six have 
dropped their other given names and used these surnames. This 
custom, perhaps, has paved the way for another: that of making 
given names of any proper nouns that happen to strike the fancy. 
Thus General Sherman was named after an Indian chief, Tecumseh, 
and a former Chicago judge was baptized Kenesaw Mountain 51 in 
memory of the battle that General Sherman fought there. A late 
candidate for governor of Hew York had the curious given name of 
D-Cady, and a late American ethnologist, McGee, always insisted 
that his first name was simply W J, and that these letters were not 
initials and should not be followed by periods . 52 Various familiar 
American given names, originally surnames, are almost unknown in 
England, among them, Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, 
Columbus and Lee. Chauncey forms a curious addition to the list. 
It was the surname of the second president of Harvard College, and 
was bestowed upon their offspring by numbers of his graduates. It 
then got into general use and acquired a typically American pro¬ 
nunciation, with the a of the first syllable flat. It is never en¬ 
countered in England. 

Americans, in general, manifest a much freer spirit in the inven¬ 
tion of new given names than the English, who remain faithful, in 
the main, to the biblical and historical names. Dr. Louise Pound, 
that most alert observer of American speech-habits, lists some very 
curious coinages , 53 among them the blends, Olouise (from Olive and 
Louise ), Marjette (Marjorie -f- Henrietta ), Maybeth (May -f- Elizar 
beth), Lunette (Inina -j- Nettie ), Leilabeth (Leila -f- Elizabeth ), 

61 The Geographic Board has lately decided that Kenesaw should be Kennesaw, 
but the learned jurist sticks to one n. 

“Thornton reprints a paragraph from the Congressional Globe of June 15, 
1854, alleging that in 1846, during the row over the Oregon boundary, when 
“Fifty-four forty or fight” was a political slogan, many “canal-boats, and even 
some of the babies, . . . were christened 54° W” 

63 Stunts in Language, English Journal, Feb., 1920, p. 92; Blends, Anglistisohe 
Forschungen, heft 42, p. 16. 


PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA 


351 


Rosetta (Rose -f- Bella), Adrielle (Adrienne -J- Belle), Birdene 
(Birdie -f" Pauline), Bethene (Elizabeth -|-| Christine), Olabelle 
(Ola -f- Isabel), and Armina (Ardelia + Wilhelmina) . Even sur¬ 
names and men’s given names are employed in these feminine blends, 
as in Romiette (Romeo -f- Juliette), Adnelle (Addison -f- Nettie), 
Adelloyd (Addie -f- Lloyd), and Charline (Charles -j- Pauline). A 
woman professor in the Middle West has the given name of Eldarema, 
coined from those of her grandparents, EXkanah, Daniel , Rebecca and 
il/an/. 54 In some parts of the United States, particularly south of 
the Potomac, men’s given names are quite as fantastic. Holce, Ollie 
and Champ are familiar to students of latter-day political history 
In the mountains of Tennessee one encounters such prodigies as 
Lute , BinJc, Ott and Gin. 55 The negroes, like the white immigrants, 
have a great liking for fancy given names. The old-time Janes, 
’Lizas and Jinnies have almost disappeared. Among the ladies of 
color who have passed through my kitchen in Baltimore during the 
past twenty years have been Geneva, Nicholine, Leah, Celeste, Evelyn, 
Olivia, Blanche, Isabelle, Dellott, Irene and Violet , 56 

In the pronunciation of various given names, as in that of many 
surnames, English and American usages differ. Evelyn, in England, 
is given two syllables instead of three, and the first is made to rhyme 
with leave. Irene is given three syllables, making it Irene-y. Ralph 
is pronounced Rafe. Jerome is accented on the first syllable; in 

M The following curious girls’ names from Texas are taken from a roster 
of Texas high-school students who competed in interscholastic games and 
debates at the University of Texas, May 4, 5 and 6, 1922: Edina, Blooma, 
Estha, Ardis, Adair, Iantha, Alleyne, Inabeth, Orie, Versey, Vhvimne, DeRue^ 
Oleane, Leora, Italia, Ila, Gomeria, Artie, Sumnell, Texana, Verla, Lady, Eula, 
Sweetie, Valaria, Winsome. Fully a quarter of all the girls listed bore such 
fantastic names. On the boys’ list I find Buster, Dee, Bush, Homer, King, 
Hope, Virgil, Len, Van, Cuvier, Ercell, Otis, Cody and Elvin. Some of the 
combinations of given name and surname are very curious, e.g., Geraldine 
Slovak, June Younker, Patricia Shook, Gomeria Walker, Swanell Hoel, Gazelle 
Williams, Lessie Vickers and Ur a Bibb. 

55 Among the members of the House of Representatives, 67th Congress, I 
find these given-names: Joe, Cyrenus, Finis, Ben, Ardolph, Fritz, Ladislasi, Bill, 
Nestor, Lilius, Sam, Sid, Zebulon, Will, Phil, Fred, Lon, Archie, Royal, Cassias 
and Leonidas. 

68 A correspondent, Mr. Louis N. Feipel, tells me that he is at work upon a 
treatise upon negro names and asks the prayers of the gentry. “A field,” 
he says, “that offers such material as the names of Sojourner Truth, High¬ 
tower T. Kealing, James Africanus Beale Horton, Caesar Andrew Augustus t 
Powhatan Taylor, Single Thomas Webster Jones, Henry Box Brown, Samuel 
Adjai Growth Abayomi Wilfrid Karnga and Ham Mukasa surely deserves 
to be tilled.” 


352 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


America it is always accented on the second . 57 In diminutives there 
are several differences. The English Jem is almost unknown in 
the United States and so are Hal and Alf. The English, on the 
other hand, seldom use Peggy, Teddy or Beth. In general there has 
been a tendency to drop diminutives. When I was a boy it was 
rare, at least in the South, to hear such names as Charles, William „ 
Elizabeth, Frederick, Margaret and Lillian used in full, but now it is 
very common. This new custom, I believe, owes something to 
English example . 58 


3 . 

Geographical Names 

“There is no part of the world,” said Robert Louis Stevenson, 
“where nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous and picturesque 
as in the United States of America.” A glance at the latest Linited 
States Official Postal Guide 59 or report of the United States Geo¬ 
graphic Board 60 quite bears out this opinion. The map of the 
country is besprinkled with place names from at least half a hundred 
languages, living and dead, and among them one finds examples of 
the most daring and elaborate fancy. There are Spanish, French 
and Indian names as melodious and charming as running water; 
there are names out of the histories and mythologies of all the great 
races of man; there are names grotesque and names almost sublime. 
“Mississippi!” rhapsodized Walt Whitman; “the word winds with 
chutes—it rolls a stream three thousand miles long. . . . Mononga- 


67 The Irish present some curious variants. Thus, they divide Charles into 
two syllables. The man who founded the St. Louis Republic, in 1808, was an 
Irishman named Charles. He pronounced his name in two syllables. But his 
neighbors would not, so he added another s. Then he was known as Charless. 

88 A rather curious device, apparently confined to Maryland, is that of distin¬ 
guishing between two relatives (usually cousins) of the same surname and 
given name by adding the initials of their fathers’ given names. Thus, if two 
cousins are both named John Brown, the one being the son of Richard and the 
other of Thomas, the first becomes John Brown of R. and the second John Brown 
of T. 

89 Issued annually in July, with monthly supplements. 

"The report here used is the fourth, covering the period 1890-1916; Wash¬ 
ington, 1916. The fifth, covering the period 1890-1920, was published in 1921. 


PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA 


353 


hela! it rolls with venison richness upon the palate.” No other 
country can match our geographical names for interest and variety. 
When there arises among us a philologist who will study them as 
thoroughly and intelligently as the Swiss, Johann Jakob Egli, studied 
the place names of Central Europe, his work will be an invaluable 
contribution to the history of the nation, and no less to an understand¬ 
ing of the psychology of its people . 61 

The original English settlers, it would appear, displayed little 
imagination in naming the new settlements and natural features 
of the land that they came to. Their almost invariable tendency, at 
the start, was to make use of names familiar at home, or to invent 
banal compounds. Plymouth Rock at the North and Jamestown at 
the South are examples of their poverty of fancy; they filled the nar¬ 
row tract along the coast with new Bostons, Cambridges, Bristols 
and Londons, and often used the adjective as a prefix. But this was 
only in the days of beginning. Once they had begun to move back 
from the coast and to come into contact with the aborigines and 
with the widely dispersed settlers of other races, they encountered 
rivers, mountains, lakes and even towns that bore far more engaging 
names, and these, after some resistance, they perforce adopted. The 
native names of such rivers as the James, the York and the Charles 
succumbed, but those of the Potomac, the Patapsco, the Merrimac 
and the Penobscot survived, and they were gradually reinforced as 
the country was penetrated. Most of these Indian names, in getting 
upon the early maps, suffered somewhat severe simplifications. 
Potowanmeac was reduced to Potomack and then to Potomac; Uneaur 
kara became Niagara; Reckawackes, by the law of Hobson-Jobson, 
was turned into Rockaway, and Pentapang into Port Tobacco ? 2 
But, despite such elisions and transformations, the charm of thou¬ 
sands of them remained, and today they are responsible for much of 
the characteristic color of American geographical nomenclature. 
Such names as Tallahassee, Susquehanna, Mississippi, Allegheny, 

61 No such general investigation has been attempted, though a good deal of 
material for it is assembled in the Origin of Certain Place Names in the United 
States, by Henry Gannett, 2nd ed.; Washington, 1905, and in A History of the 
Origin of the Place Names in Nine Northwestern States, 2nd ed.; Chicago, 1908. 

a The authority here is River and Lake Names in the United States, by 
Edmund T. Ker; New York, 1911. Stephen G. Boyd, in Indian Local Names; 
York (Pa.), 1885, says that the original Indian name was Pootuppag. 


354 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


Chicago, Kennebec, Patuxent and Kalamazoo give a barbaric bril¬ 
liancy to the American map. Only the map of Australia can 
match it. 

The settlement of the American continent, once the eastern coast 
ranges were crossed, proceeded with unparalleled speed, and so the 
naming of the new rivers, lakes, peaks and valleys, and of the new 
towns and districts no less, strained the inventiveness of the pioneers. 
The result is the vast duplication of names that shows itself in the 
Postal Guide. No less than eighteen imitative Bostons and New 
Bostons still appear, and there are nineteen Bristols, twenty-eight 
Newports, and twenty-two Londons and New Londons. Argonauts 
starting out from an older settlement on the coast would take its name 
with them, and so we find Philadelphias in Illinois, Mississippi, 
Missouri and Tennessee, Richmonds in Iowa, Kansas and nine other 
western states, and Princetons in fifteen. Even when a new name 
was hit upon it seems to have been hit upon simultaneously by scores 
of scattered bands of settlers; thus we find the whole land bespattered 
with Washingtons, Lafayettes, Jeffersons and Jacksons, and with 
names suggested by common and obvious natural objects, e. g., Bear 
Creek, Bald Knob and Buffalo. The Geographic Board, in its fourth 
report, made a belated protest against this excessive duplication. 
“The names Elk, Beaver, Coitonwood and Bald,” it said, “are alto¬ 
gether too numerous.” Of postoffices alone there are fully a hundred 
embodying Elk; counting in rivers, lakes, creeks, mountains and 
valleys, the map of the United States probably shows at least twice 
as many such names. 

A study of American geographical and place names reveals eight 
general classes, as follows: (a) those embodying personal names, 
chiefly the surnames of pioneers or of national heroes; ( b ) those 
transferred from other and older places, either in the eastern states 
or in Europe; ( c ) Indian names; ( d ) Dutch, Spanish, French, Ger¬ 
man and Scandinavian names; (e) Biblical and mythological names; 
(/) names descriptive of localities; ( g ) names suggested by the local 
flora, fauna or geology; ( h ) purely fanciful names. The names of 
the first class are perhaps the most numerous. Some consist of sur- 
names standing alone, as Washington, Cleveland, Bismarck, L/afay- 
ette, 7 aylor and Randolph j others consist of surnames in eombina- 


PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA 


355 


tion with various old and new Grundworter, as Pittsburgh, Knox¬ 
ville, Bailey's Snntch, Hagerstown, Franklinton, Dodge City, Fort 
Riley, Wayne Junction and McKeesport; and yet others are con¬ 
trived of given names, either alone or in combination, as Louisville, 
St. Paul, Elizabeth, Johnstown, Charlotte, Williamsburg and Marys¬ 
ville. All our great cities are surrounded by grotesque Bensonhursts, 
Bryn Joneses, Smithvales and Krauswoods. The number of towns 
in the United States bearing women’s given names is enormous. I 
find, for example, eleven postoffices called Charlotte, ten called Ada 
and no less than nineteen called Alma. Most of these places are 
small, but there is an Elizabeth with 100,000 population, an Elmira 
with 45,000, and an Augusta with more than 50,000. 

The names of the second class we have already briefly observed. 
They are betrayed in many cases by the prefix New; more than 600 
such postoffices are recorded, ranging from New Albany to New 
Windsor. Others bear such prefixes as West, North and South, or 
various distinguishing affixes, e . g., Bostonia, Pittsburgh Landing, 
Yorktown and Hartford City. One often finds eastern county names 
applied to western towns and eastern town names applied to western 
rivers and mountains. Thus, Cambria, which is the name of a 
county hut not of a postoffice in Pennsylvania, is a town in seven 
western states; Baltimore is the name of a glacier in Alaska, and 
Princeton is the name of a peak in Colorado. In the same way the 
names of the more easterly states often reappear in the west, e. g., 
in Mount Ohio, Colo., Delaware, Okla., and Virginia City, Nev. 
The tendency to name small American towns after the great capitals 
of antiquity has excited the derision of the English since the earliest 
days; there is scarcely an English book upon the states without some 
fling at it. Of late it has fallen into abeyance, though sixteen 
Athenses still remain, and there are yet many Carthages, TJticas, 
Syracuses, Romes, Alexandras, Ninevehs and Troys. The third 
city of the nation, Philadelphia, got its name from the ancient 
stronghold of Philadelphus of Pergamon. To make up for the 
falling off of this old and flamboyant custom, the more recent immi¬ 
grants have brought with them the names of the capitals and other 
great cities of their fatherlands. Thus the American map bristles 
with Berlins, Bremens, Hamburgs, Warsaws and Leipzigs, and is 


356 THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 

beginning to show Stockholms, Venices, Belgrades and Chris- 
tianias . 63 

The influence of Indian names upon American nomenclature is 
quickly shown by a glance at the map. Ho fewer than 26 of the 
states have names borrowed from the aborigines, 64 and the same 
thing is true of most of our rivers and mountains, and of large 
numbers of our towns and counties. 65 There was an effort, at one 
time, to get rid of these Indian names. Thus the early Virginians 
changed the name of the Powhatan to the Jantes, and the first settlers 
in Hew York changed the name of Horicon to Lake George. In the 
same way the present name of the White Mountains displaced Agio- 


**Cf. Amerikanska Ortnamn af Svenskt Ursprung, by V. Berger; New York, 
1915. The Swedish names listed by Mr. Berger are chiefly to be found in Minne¬ 
sota, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas. 

M In most of the states local antiquaries have investigated the state names. 
Vide, for example, The Origin and Meaning of the Name California, by George 
Davidson; San Francisco, 1910; California, the Name, by Ruth Putnam; Berke¬ 
ley, 1917; Arizona, Its Derivation and Origin, by Merrill P. Freeman; Tucson, 
1913; Ohio, 1803-1903, by Maria Ewing Martin; New Straitsville, 1903; The 
Naming of Indiana, by Cyrus W. Hodgin; Richmond (Ind.), 1903; Idaho, Its 
Meaning, Origin and Application, by John E. Rees; Portland (Ore.), 1917. 

“The student interested in the subject will find useful information in The 
History and Geography of Texas as Told in County Names, by Z. T. Fulmore; 
Austin, 1915; Spanish and Indian Place Names of California, by Nellie van de 
Grift Sanchez; San Francisco, 1914; The Powhatan Name for Virginia, by 
W. W. Tooker, American Anthropologist, vol. viii, no. 1, 1906; Chicago: Origin 
of the Name of Our City, by J. F. Steward; Chicago, 1904; Some More About 
Virginia Names, by W. W. Tooker, American Anthropologist, vol. vii, no. 3, 
1905; The Origin of the Name of Buffalo, by Wm. Ketchum, Pub. Buffalo Hist. 
Society, vol. i, p. 17. 1879; The Origin of the Name Manhattan, by W. W. 
Tooker; New York, 1901; British Columbia Coast Names, by John D. Walbran; 
Ottawa, 1909; Place-Names in the Thousand Islands, by James White; 
Ottawa, 1910; Minnesota Geographic Names, by Warren Upham, Collections of 
the Minnesota Hist. Society, vol. xvii, 1920; Indian Names of Water Courses in 
the State of Indiana, by H. W. Beckwith (in Annual Report, Dept, of Geology 
and Natural History; Indianapolis, 1883) ; Origin of Ohio Place-Names, by 
Maria E. Martin, Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, vol. xiv, p. 272; 
Origin and Meaning of Wisconsin Place-Names, by Henry E. Legler, Tr. of the 
Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, vol. xiv, pt. i, 1903; Geo¬ 
graphical Names on the Coast of Maine, by Edward Ballard (in Report of the 
Coast Survey; Washington, 1868) ; Baraboo and Other Place-Names in Sauk 
County, Wisconsin, by H. E. Cole; Baraboo, 1912; Names of Places of Interest 
on Mackinac Island, by Frank A. O’Brien; Lansing (Mich.), 1916; The Niagara 
Frontier, by Orsamus H. Marshall; Buffalo, 1881; How Missouri Counties, 
Towns and Streams W T ere Named, by David W. Eaton; Columbia (Mo.), 1917; 
Indian Place-Names, by Moses Greenleaf: Bangor (Me.), 1903; The Composition 
of Indian Geographical Names, by J. Hammond Trumbull, Collections of the 
Connecticut Hist. Society, vol. ii, p. 1 , 1870; The Indian Place-Names on Long 
Island, by W. W. Tooker; New York, 1911; Indian Names of Places in . . . 
Massachusetts, by Lincoln N. Kinnicutt; Worcester, 1909; Indian Names of 
Places in and on the Borders of Connecticut, by J. Hammond Trumbull; Hart- 


PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA 


357 


chook, Mt. Rainer displaced Tacoma (or TaJioma) 66 and New 
Amsterdam, and later New York, displaced Manhattan, which 
has been recently revived. The law of Hobson-Johnson made 
changes in other Indian names, sometimes complete and some¬ 
times only partial. Thus, Mauwauwaming became Wyoming, 
Maucwachoong became Mauch Chunk, Ouabache became Wabash, 
A singsing became Sing-Sing, and Machihiganing became Michigan. 
But this vandalism did not go far enough to take away the brilliant 
color of the aboriginal nomenclature. 67 The second city of the 
United States bears an Indian name, and so do the largest American 
river, and the greatest American water-fall, and four of the five Great 
Lakes, and the scene of the most important military decision ever 
reached on Aanerican soil. 

The Dutch place-names of the United States are chiefly confined to 
the vicinity of Hew York, and a good many of them have become 
greatly corrupted. Brooklyn, Wallabout and Gramercy offer ex¬ 
amples. The first-named was originally Breuckelen, the second was 
Waale Bobht, and the third was De Kromme Zee. Hell-Gate is a 
crude translation of the Dutch Helle-Gat. During the early part of 
the last century the more delicate Hew Yorkers transformed the term 
into Hurlgate, but the change was vigorously opposed by Washing- 

ford, 1881; Dictionary of American-Indian Place and Proper Names in New 
England, by R. A. Douglas-Lithgow; Salem (Mass.), 1909; California Place- 
Names of Indian Origin, by A. L. Kroeber; Berkeley, 1916; Indian Names of 
Places in Rhode Island, by Usher Parsons; Providence, 1861; Indian Geographic 
Names of Indian Origin, by A. L. Kroeber; Berkeley, 1916; Indian Names of 
Places Near the Great Lakes, by Dwight H. Kelton; Detroit, 1888; The Indian 
Names of Boston, by Eben N. Horsford; Cambridge, 1886; Footprints of the 
Red Men, by E. M. Ruttenber; Newburgh (N. Y.), 1906; Indian Names of 
Places in Worcester County, Mass., by Lincoln N. Kinnicutt; Worcester, 1905; 
Indian Names and History of the Sault Ste. Marie Canal, by Dwight H. Kelton; 
Detroit, 1889; Proper Names from the Muskhogean Languages, by Noxon 
Toomey; St. Louis, 1917; Report of the Aboriginal Names and Geographical 
Terminology of the State of New York, by Henry R. Schoolcraft, pt. i; New 
York, 1845. Other works are listed in the Bibliography. 

66 This substitution, I am informed, was due to the jealousy of Seattle, 
the citizens of which objected to having the greatest American peak south of 
Alaska bear the name of the rival city of Tacoma. 

91 Walt Whitman bitterly opposed such changes. He even demanded that 
Indian names be substituted for names of other origin. “California,” he said, 
“is sown thick with the names of big and little saints. Chase them away and 
substitute aboriginal names. . . . No country can have its own poems without 
having its own names. The name of Niagara should be substituted for St. 
Lawrence. Among the places that stand in need of fresh, appropriate names 
are the great cities of St. Louis, New Orleans, St. Paul.” 


358 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


ton Irving, and so Hell-Gate was revived. The law of Hobson-Jobson 
early converted the Dutch hoek into hook, and it survives in various 
place-names, e. g., Kinderhook and Sandy Hook. The Dutch kill is 
a Grundwort in many other names, e. g., Catskill, Schuylkill, Peeks- 
killy Fishkill and Kill van Kull; it is the equivalent of the American 
creek. Many other Dutch place-names will come familiarly to mind: 
Harlem, Staten, Flushing, Cortlandt, Calver, Plaat, Nassau, Coerir 
ties, Spuyten Duyvel, Yonkers, Barnegat, Bowery (from B'ou- 
very ). 68 Block Island was originally Blok, and Cape May, according 
to Scheie de Vere, was Mey, both Dutch. A large number of Hew 
York street and neighborhood names come down from Knickerbocker 
days, often greatly changed in pronunciation. Deshrosses offers an 
example. The Dutch called it de Broose, but in Hew York today it is 
commonly spoken of as Des-bros-sez. 

French place-names have suffered almost as severely. Few per¬ 
sons would recognize Smack over, the name of a small town in Ar- 
kansas, as French, and yet in its original form it was Chemin Cour 
vert , 69 Scheie de Vere, in 1871, recorded the degeneration of the 
name to Smack Cover; the Postoffice, always eager to shorten and 
simplify names, has since made one word of it and got rid of the 
redundant c. In the same way Bob Ruly, a Missouri name, descends 
from Bois Brule; Glazypool, the name of an Arkansas mountain, 
from Glaise a Paul; Low Freight, the name of an Arkansas river, 
from UEau Froid, and Baraboo from Baribault. “The American 
tongue,” says W. W. Crane, “seems to lend itself reluctantly to the 
words of alien languages.” 70 A large number of French place-names, 
e. g., Lac Superieur, were translated into English at an early day, 
and most of those that remain are now pronounced as if they were 
English. Thus Des Moines is dee-moyn, Terre Haute is terry-hut, 
Beaufort is byu-fort in South Carolina (but bo-fort in Horth Caro¬ 
lina!). New Orleans is or-leens. Bonne Terre, an old town near St. 
Louis, is bonnie tar, Lafayette has a flat a, Havre de Grace has an¬ 
other, and Versailles is ver-sales. The pronunciation of sault, as in 

88 Cf. Dutch Contributions to the Vocabulary of English in America, by W. H. 
Carpenter, Modern Philology, July, 1908. 

99 Cf. Some Old French Place-Names in the State of Arkansas, by John C. 
Branner, Modern Language Notes, vol. xiv, no. 2, 1899. 

70 Our Naturalized Names, Lippinoott’s Magazine, April, 1899. 


PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA 


359 


Sault Ste. Marie, is commonly more or less correct; the Minneapolis, 
St. Paul and Sault Ste. Marie Railroad is popularly called the Soo. 
This may be due to Canadian example, or to some confusion between 
Sault and Sioux. The French Louis, in Louisville, is usually pro¬ 
nounced correctly, but in St. Louis it is almost always converted into 
Lewis. The rouge in Baton Rouge is correctly pronuonced, though 
the baton is commonly boggled. The local pronunciation of Illinois 
is Illinoy, an attempt to improve upon the vulgar Illin-i. 

For a number of years the Geographic Board has been seeking 
vainly to reestablish the correct pronunciation of the name of the 
Purgatoire river in Colorado. Originally named the Rio de las 
Animas by the Spaniards, it was renamed the Riviere du Purgatoire 
by their French successors. The American pioneers changed this to 
Picketwire, and that remains the local name of the stream to this 
day, despite the effort of the Geographic Board to compromise on 
Purgatoire river. Many other French names are being anglicized 
with its aid and consent. Already half a dozen Bellevues have been 
changed to Belleviews and Bellviews, and the spelling of nearly all 
the Belvederes has been changed to Belvidere. Belair, La., repre¬ 
sents the end-product of a process of decay which began with Belle 
Aire, and then proceeded to Bellaire and Bellair. All these forms 
are still to be found, together with Bel Air. The Geographic Board’s 
antipathy to accented letters and to names of more than one w T ord 71 
has converted Isle Ste. Therese, in the St. Lawrence river, to Isle Ste. 
Therese, a truly abominable barbarism, and La Cygne, in Kansas, to 
Lacygne, which is even worse. 72 Lamoine, Labelle, Lagrange and 
Lamonte are among its other improvements; Lafayette, for La Fay¬ 
ette, long antedates the beginning of its labors. 

The Spanish names of the Southwest are undergoing a like process 
of corruption, though without official aid. San Antonio has changed 
to San Antone in popular pronunciation and seems likely to go to 

71 Vide its fourth report (1890-1916), p. 15. 

12 A correspondent writes: “The river on which the town is located was named 
by French explorers, late in the 18th century, Marais des Cygnes. When the 
town site was bought from the Miami Indians, about 1868, the town was named 
La Cygne. The railroad, built soon after, put the name in its time tables as 
Les Cygnes. My father started the Journal there in 1870. He persuaded 
the railroad people to change their spelling. The Postal Guide still gives it 
as La Cygne. It is usually pronounced Lay Seen.” 


360 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


San Tone; El Paso has acquired a flat American a and a 2 -sound in 
place of the Spanish s; Los Angeles presents such difficulties that no 
two of its inhabitants agree upon the proper pronunciation, and 
many compromise on simple Los, as the folks of Jacksonville com¬ 
monly call their town Jax. Some of the most mellifluous of Ameri¬ 
can place-names are in the areas once held by the Spaniards. It 
would be hard to match the beauty of Santa Margarita, San Anselmo, 
Alamogordo, Terra Amarilla, Sabinoso, Las Palomas, Ensenada, 
Nogales, San Patricio and Bernalillo. But they are under a severe 
and double assault. Not only do the present lords of the soil debase 
them in speaking them; in many cases they are formally displaced 
by native names of the utmost harshness and banality. Thus, one 
finds in New Mexico such absurdly-named towns as Sugarite, Shoe¬ 
maker, Newhope, Lordsburg, Eastview and Central; in Arizona such 
places as Old Glory, Springville, Wickenburg and Congress Junction, 
and even in California such abominations as Oakhurst, Ben Eur, 
Drytown, Skidoo, Susanville, Uno and Ono. 

The early Spaniards were prodigal with place-names testifying 
to their piety, but these names, in the overwhelming main, were those 
of saints. Add Salvador, Trinidad and Concepcion, and their reper¬ 
toire is almost exhausted. If they ever named a town Jesus the 
name has been obliterated by Anglo-Saxon prudery; even their use of 
the name as a personal appellation violates American notions of the 
fitting. The names of the Jewish patriarchs and those of the holy 
places in Palestine do not appear among their place-names; their 
Christianity seems to have been exclusively of the New Testament. 
But the Americans who displaced them were intimately familiar with 
both books of the Bible, and one finds copious proofs of it on the map 
of the United States. There are no less than eleven Beulahs, nine 
Canaans, eleven Jordans and twenty-one Sharons. Adam is sponsor 
for a town in West Virginia and an island in the Chesapeake, and 
Eve for a village in Kentucky. There are five postoffices named 
Aaron, two named Abraham, two named Job, and a town and a lake 
named Moses. Most of the St. Pauls and St. Josephs of the country 
were inherited from the French, but the two St. Patricks show a later 
influence. Eight Wesleys and Wesleyvilles, eight Asburys and 
twelve names embodying Luther indicate the general theological 


PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA 


361 


trend of the plain people. There is a village in Maryland, too small 
to have a postoffice, named Gott, and I find Gotts Island in Maine 
(in the French days, Petite Plaisance) and Gottville in California, 
but no doubt these were named after German settlers of that awful 
name, and not after the Lord God directly. There are four Trinities, 
to say nothing of the inherited Trinidads. 

Names wholly or partly descriptive of localities are very numer¬ 
ous throughout the country, and among the Grundworter embodied in 
them are terms highly characteristic of American and almost unknown 
to the English vocabulary. Bald Knob would puzzle an Englishman, 
but the name is so common in the United States that the Geographic 
Board has had to take measures against it. Others of that sort are 
Council Bluffs, Patapsco Neele, Delaware Water Gap, Curtis Creek, 
Walden Pond, Sandy Hook, Key West, Bull Run, Portage, French 
Lick, Jones Gulch, Watkins Gully, Cedar Bayou, Kearns Canyon, 
Parker Notch, Sucker Branch, Fraziers Bottom and Eagle Pass. 
Butte Creek, in Montana, is a name made up of two Americanisms. 
There are thirty-five postoffices whoso names embody the word prccirie, 
several of them, e. g.. Prairie du Chien, Wis., inherited from the 
French. There are seven Divides, eight Buttes, eight town-names em¬ 
bodying the word burnt, innumerable names embodying grove, bar¬ 
ren, plain, fork, center, cross-roads, courthouse, cove and ferry, and 
a great swarm of Cold Springs, Coldwaters, Summits, Middletowns 
and Highlands. The flora and fauna of the land are enormously 
represented. There are twenty-two Buffalos beside the city in New 
York, and scores of Buffalo Creeks, Ridges, Springs and Wallows. 
The Elks, in various forms, are still more numerous, and there are 
dozens of towns, mountains, lakes, creeks and country districts named 
after the beaver, martin, coyote, moose and otter, and as many more 
named after such characteristic flora as the paw-paw, the sycamore, 
the cottonwood, the locust and the sunflower. There is an Alligator 
in Mississippi, a Crawfish in Kentucky and a Rat Lake on the Ca¬ 
nadian border of Minnesota. The endless search for mineral wealth 
has besprinkled the map with such names as Bromide, Oil City, An¬ 
thracite, Chrome, Chloride, Coal Run, Goldfield, Telluride, Leadville 
and Cement. 

There was a time, particularly during the gold rush to California, 


362 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


when the rough humor of the country showed itself in the invention 
of extravagant and often highly felicitous place-names, but with the 
growth of population and the rise of civic spirit they have tended to 
be replaced by more seemly coinages. Catfish creek, in Wisconsin, 
is now the Yakara river; the Bulldog mountains, in Arizona, have be¬ 
come the Harosomas; the Picketwire river, as we have seen, has re¬ 
sumed its old French name of Purgatoire. As with natural features 
of the landscape, so with towns. Nearly all the old Boozevilles, Jack¬ 
ass Flats, Three Fingers, Hell-For-Sartains, Undershirt Hills, Raz¬ 
zle-Dazzles, Cow-Tails, Yellow Dogs, JimMamses, Jump-Offs, Poker 
Citys and Skunktowns have yielded to the growth of delicacy, but 
Tombstone still stands in Arizona, Goose Bill remains a postoffice 
in Montana, and the Geographic Board gives its imprimatur to the 
Horsethief trail in Colorado, to Burning Bear in the same state, 
and to Pig Eye lake in Minnesota. Various other survivors of a more 
lively and innocent day linger on the map: Blue Ball, Pa., Cowhide, 
W. Va., Dollarville, Mich., Oven Fork, Ky., Social Circle, Ga., 
Sleepy Eye, Minn., Bubble, Ark., Shy Beaver, Pa., Shin Pond, Me., 
Rough-and-Ready, Calif., Non Intervention, Va., T. B., Md., Noodle, 
Tex., Number Four, N. Y., Oblong, Ill., Stock Yards, Neb., Stout, 
Iowa, and so on. West Virginia, the wildest of the eastern states, is 
full of such place-names. Among them I find Affinity, Annamoriah 
(Anna Maria ?), Bee, Bias, Big Chimney, Billie, Blue Jay, Bulltown, 
Caress, Cinderella, Cyclone, Czar, Cornstalk, Duck, Halcyon, Jingo, 
Left Hand, Ravens Eye, Six, Skull Run, Three Churches, Uneeda, 
Wide Mouth, War Eagle and Stumptown. The Postal Guide shows 
two Ben Hurs, five St. Elmos and ten Ivanhoes, but only one Middle- 
march. There are seventeen Roosevelts, six Codys and six Barnums, 
but no Shakespeare. Washington, of course, is the most popular of 
Aanerican place-names. But among names of postoffices it is hard 
pushed by Clinton, Centerville, Liberty, Canton, Marion and Madi¬ 
son, and even by Springfield, Warren and Bismarck. 

Many American place-names are purely arbitrary coinages. 
Towns on the border between two states, or near the border, are often 
given names made of parts of the names of the two states, e. g., Pen- 
Mar (Pennsylvania-]-Maryland), Del-Mar and Mar-Del (Mary¬ 
land-{-Delaware), Texarkana (Texas-]-Arkansas), Kanorado 


PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA 


363 


(Kansas-}-Colorado), Texhoma (T exas-}-Oklahoma), Dakom- 
ing (Dakota-\-Wyoming), Texico ( Texas-\-New Mexico), Cal¬ 
exico (California-}-Mexico). Norlina is a telescope form of 
North Carolina. Ohiowa (Neb.) was named by settlers wbo 
came partly from Ohio and partly from Iowa. Penn Yan 
(N. Y.) was named by Pennsylvanians and New Englanders, i. e., 
Yankees. Colwich (Kansas) is a telescope form of the name of the 
Colorado and Wichita Railroad. There are two Delmars in the 
United States. The name of one is a blend of Delaware and Mary¬ 
land; the name of the other (in Iowa) was “made by using tKe 
names (i. e., the initials of the names) of six women who accom¬ 
panied an excursion that opened the railroad from Clinton, Iowa.” 73 
In the same state Le Mars got its name in exactly the same way. 
Benld (Ill.) is a collision form of Benjamin L. Dorsey, the name of 
a local magnifico; Cadams (Neb.) is a collision form of C. Adams; 
Wascott (Wis.) derives from W. A. Scott; Eleroy (Ill.) from E. 
Leroy; Bucoda (Wash.) is a blend of Buckley, Collier and Davis; 
Caldeno, a waterfall at the Delaware Water Gap, got its name 
in 1851 from the names of three visitors, C. L. Pascal, C. S. Ogden, 
and Joseph McLeod; 74 Pacoman (N. C.) derives from the name 
of E. H. Coapman, a former vice-president of the Southern Railway; 
Gilsum (N. H.) is a blend of Gilbert and Sumner; Paragould (Ark.) 
is a blend of W. J. Paramore and Jay Gould; Marenisco (Mich.) is 
named after Mary Relief Niles Scott; Miloma (Minn.) derives its 
name from the first syllable of Milwaukee, in the name of the Mil¬ 
waukee, Chicago, Minneapolis & St. Paul Railroad, and the first 
two syllables of Omaha, in the name of the Chicago, Minneapolis 
& Omaha Railroad; Gerled (Iowa) is a blend of Germanic and 
Ledyard, the names of two nearby townships; Roly at (Ore.) is simply 
Taylor spelled backward; Biltmore (N. C.) is the last syllable ot 
Vanderbilt plus the Gaelic Grundwort, more. 

The Geographic Board, in its laudable effort to simplify American 
nomenclature, has played ducks and drakes with some of the most 
picturesque names on the national map. Now and then, as in the case 
of Purgatoire, it has temporarily departed from this policy, but in 

13 Louise Pound: Blends, Anglistische Forsohungen , heft 42, p. 10. 

,4 The Delaware Water Gap, by L. W. Brodhead; Phila., 1870, p. 274 ff. 


364 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


the main its influence has been thrown against the fine old French and 
Spanish names, and against the more piquant native names no less. 
Thus, I find it deciding against Portage des Flacons and in favor 
of the hideous Bottle portage, against Canada del Burro and in favor 
of Burro canyon, against Canons y Ylas de la Cruz and in favor of the 
barbarous Cruz island™ In Bougere landing and Canon City it 
has deleted the accents. The name of the De Grasse river it 
has changed to Grass. De Laux it has changed to the intolerable Dio. 
And, as we have seen, it has steadily amalgamated French and Span¬ 
ish articles with their nouns, thus achieving such barbarous forms 
as Duchesne, Eldorado, Deleon and Laharpe. But here its policy is 
fortunately inconsistent, and so a number of fine old names have 
escaped. Thus, it has decided in favor of Bon Secours and against 
Bonsecours, and in favor of De Soto, La Crosse and La Moure, and 
against Desoto, Lacrosse and Lamoure. Here its decisions are con¬ 
fused and often unintelligible. Why Laporte, Pa., and La Porte, 
Iowa ? Why Lagrange, Ind., and La Grange, Ky. ? Here it would 
seem to be yielding a great deal too much to local usage. 

The Board proceeds to the shortening and simplification of native 
names by various devices. It deletes such suffixes as town, city and 
courthouse; it removes the apostrophe and often the genitive s from 
such names as St. Mary’s; it shortens burgh to burg and borough to 
boro; and it combines separate and often highly discrete words. The 
last habit often produces grotesque forms, e. g., Newberlin, Boxelder, 
Sabbathday lake, Fallentimber, Bluemountain, Westtown, Three- 
pines and Missionhill. It apparently cherishes a hope of eventually 
regularizing the spelling of Allegany. This is now Allegany for the 
Maryland county, the Pennsylvania township and the New York and 
Oregon towns, Alleghany for the Colorado town and the Virginia 
county and springs, and Allegheny for the mountains, the Pittsburgh 
borough and the Pennsylvania county, college and river. The Board 
inclines to Allegheny for all. Other Indian names give it constant 
concern. Its struggles to set up Chemquasabamticook as the name 
of a Maine lake in place of Chemquasabamtic and Chemquassabamti- 
cook, and Chatahospee as the name of an Alabama creek in place of 

"Canada goes the United States one better, with Ste. Anne de la Boundary 
Line! 


PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA 


365 


Chattahospee, Iloolethlocco, Hoolethloces, Hoolethloco and Hootetlir 
locco are worthy of its learning and authority. 76 

The American tendency to pronounce all the syllables of a word 
more distinctly than the English shows itself in geographical names. 
White, in 1880, 77 recorded the increasing habit of giving full value 
to the syllables of such borrowed English names as Worcester and 
Warwick. I have frequently noted the same thing. In Worcester 
county, Maryland, the name is usually pronounced Wooster, but on 
the Western Shore of the state one hears Worcester. Norwich is 
another such name; one hears Nor-wich quite as often as Norrich. 
Amother is Delhi; one often hears Del-high. Another is Warwick. 
Yet another is Birmingham; it is pronounced as spelled in the United 
States, and never in the English manner. White said that in his 
youth the name of the Shawangunk mountains, in New York, was 
pronounced Shongo, but that the custom of pronouncing it as spelled 
had arisen during his manhood. 78 So with Winnipiseogee, the name 
of a lake; once Winipisaukie, it gradually came to be pronounced as 
spelled. There is frequently a considerable difference between the 
pronunciation of a name by natives of a place and its pronunciation 
by those who are familiar with it only in print. Baltimore offers an ex¬ 
ample. The natives always drop the medial i and so reduce the name 
to two syllables; in addition, they substitute a neutral vowel, very 
short, for the o. Anne Arundel, the name of a county in Maryland, 
is usually pronounced Ann rani by its people. Arkansas, as everyone 


79 The Geographic Board is composed of representatives of the Coast and 
Geodetic Survey, the Geological Survey, the General Land Office, the Post Office, 
the Forest Service, the Smithsonian Institution, the Biological Survey, the 
Government Printing Office, the Census and Lighthouse Bureaus, the General 
Staff of the Army, the Hydrographic Office, the Library and War Records Office of 
the Navy, the Treasury and the Department of State. It was created by execu¬ 
tive order Sept. 4, 1890, and its decisions are binding upon all federal officials. 
It has made, to date, more than 25,000 decisions. They are recorded in reports 
issued at irregular intervals and in more frequent bulletins. 

77 Every-Day English, p. 100. See also Tucker: American English, p. 33. 

78 This pedantry seems to have disappeared. The local pronunciation today is 
Shongum. I have often noted that Americans, in speaking of the familiar 
Worcestershire sauce, commonly pronounce every syllable and enunciate shire 
distinctly. In England it is always Woostersh’r. The English have a great 
number of decayed pronunciations, e. g.. Maudlin for Magdalen College, Sister 
for Cirencester, Merrybone for Marylebone. Their geographical nomenclature 
shows many corruptions due to faulty pronunciation and the law of Hobson- 
Jobson, e. g., Leighton Buzzard for the Norman Leiton Beau Desart. 


366 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


knows, is pronounced Arkansaw by the Arkansans . 70 The local pro¬ 
nunciation of Illinois is Illinoy. Iowa is sometimes Ioway . 60 Many 
American geographical names offer great difficulty to Englishmen. 
One of my English acquaintances tells mo that ho was taught at school 
to accent Massachusetts on the second syllable, to rhyme the second 
syllable of Ohio with tea, and to sound the second c in Connecticut. 
In Maryland the name of Calvert county is given a broad a, whereas 
the name of Calvert street, in Baltimore, has a flat a. This curious 
distinction is almost always kept up. A Scotchman, coming to Amer¬ 
ica, would give the ch in such names as Loch Haven and Lochvale 
the guttural Scotch (and German) sound, but locally it is always pro¬ 
nounced as if it were k. 

Finally, there is a curious difference between English and Ameri¬ 
can usage in the use of the word river. The English invariably put 
it before tho proper name, whereas wo almost as invariably put it 
after. The Thames Iliver would seem quite as strange to an English¬ 
man as the river Chicago would seem to us. This difference arose 
moro than a century ago and was noticed by Pickering. But in his 
day the American usage was still somewhat uncertain, and such 
forms as the river Mississipjri were yet in use. Today river almost 
always goes after the proper name. 


4 . 


Street Names 


“Such a locality as ‘the corner of Avenue II and Twenty-third 
street,’ ” says W. W. Crane, “is about as distinctly American as Al¬ 
gonquin and Iroquois names like Mississippi and Saratoga.” 81 Kip¬ 
ling, in his “American Notes,” 8 “ gives testimony to the strangeness 
with which the number-names, the phrase “the corner of,” and tho 


19 Vide Proceedings of the Legislature and of (he Historical Society of the 
State of Arkansas, and the Eclectic Society, of Little Rock, Ark., Fixing the 
Pronunciation of the Name Arkansas; Little Rock, 1881. 

“Curiously enough, Americans always use the broad a in the first syllablo 
of Albany , whereas Englishmen rhyme the syllable with jxil. 

B1 ()ur Street Names, l.ippinoott's Magazine, Aug., 1807, p. 2(54. 

“Ch. i. * 


PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA 


367 


custom of omitting street fall upon the oar of a Britisher. lie quotes 
with amazement certain directions given to him on his arrival in San 
Francisco from India: “Go six blocks north to [the] corner of Geary 
and Markoy [Market?] ; then walk around till you strike [the] cor¬ 
ner of Sutter mid Sixteenth.” The English always add the word 
street (or road or place or avenue ) when speaking of a thoroughfare; 
such a phrase as “Oxford and New Bond” would strike them as in¬ 
congruous. The American custom of numbering and lettering streets 
is almost always ascribed by English writers who discuss it, not to 
a desire to make finding them easy, but to sheer poverty of invention. 
The English apparently have an inexhaustible fund of names for 
streets; they often give one street more than one name. Thus, Ox¬ 
ford street, London, becomes the Bayswater road, High street, Hol¬ 
land Park avenue, Goldhawke road and finally the Oxford road to 
the westward, and High Ilolbom, Ilolbom viaduct, Newgate street, 
Cheapside, the Poultry, Cornhill and Leadenhall street to the east¬ 
ward. The Strand, in the same way, becomes Fleet street, Ludgale 
hill and Cannon street. Nevertheless, there is a First avenue in 
Queen’s Park, London, and parallel to it are Second, Third, Fourth, 
Fifth and Sixth avenues—all small streets leading northward from 
the Harrow road, just east of Konsal Green cemetery. I have ob¬ 
served that few Londoners have ever heard of them. There is also 
a First street in Chelsea—a very modest thoroughfare near Lennox 
Gardens and not far from the Brornpton Oratory. 

Next to the numbering and lettering of streets, a fashion apparent¬ 
ly set up by Major Pierre-Charles L’Enfant’s plans for Washington, 
tho most noticeable feature of American street nomenclature, as op¬ 
posed to that of England, is the extensive use of such designations as 
avenue, boulevard, drive and speedway. Avenue is used in England, 
but only rather sparingly; it is seldom applied to a mean street, or 
to one in a warehouse district. In America the word is scarcely dis¬ 
tinguished in meaning from street. 8 '* Boulevard, drive and speed- 

8,1 There are, of course, local exceptions. In Baltimore, for example, avvmie 
used to bo reserved for wide streets in the suburbs. Thus Charles street, on 
passing the old city boundary, became Charles strcet-avcnuc. Further out it 
became Charles strcet-avenuc-road —probably a unique triplication. But that 
was years ago. Of lato many iifth-rate streets in Baltimore have been changed 
into avenues. 


368 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


way are almost unknown to the English, but they use road for urban 
thoroughfares, which is very seldom done in America, and they also 
make free use of place, walk, passage, lane and circus, all of which 
are obsolescent on this side of the ocean. Some of the older American 
cities, such as Boston and Baltimore, have surviving certain ancient 
English designations of streets, e. g., Cheapside and Cornhill; these 
are unkn own in the newer American towns. Broadway, which is also 
English, is more common. Many American towns now have plazas, 
which are unknown in England. Nearly all have City Hall parks, 
squares or places; City Hall is also unknown over there. The prin¬ 
cipal street of a small town, in America, is almost always Main street; 
in England it is as invariably High street, usually with the definite 
article before High. 

I have mentioned the corruption of old Dutch street and neighbor¬ 
hood names in New York. Spanish names are corrupted in the 
same way in the Southwest and French names in the Great Lakes 
region and in Louisiana. In New Orleans the street names, many 
of them strikingly beautiful, are pronounced so barbarously by the 
people that a Frenchman would have difficulty recognizing them. 
Thus, Bourbon has become Bur-bun, Dauphine is Daw-fin, Foucher 
is Foosh’r, Enghien is En-gine, and Felicity (originally F licite ) is 
Fill-a-city. The French, in their day, bestowed the names of the 
Muses upon certain of the city streets. They are now pronounced 
Cal-y-ope, T erp-si-chore, Mel-pa-mean, You-terp, and so on. Bons 
Enfants, apparently too difficult for the native, has been translated 
into Good Children. Only Esplanade and Bagatelle, among the 
French street names of the city, seem to be commonly pronounced 
with any approach to correctness. Worse, there is a growing ten¬ 
dency to translate the old names. Thus, the rue Roy ale is now usu¬ 
ally called Royal street. 

The use of at in the phrase, “Fifth avenue at 48th street,” seems 
to be an Americanism. It indicates that the house designated is near 
the comer, but not actually at it. I have never observed this use of 
at in England. 



XI. 

AMERICAN SLANG 

1 . 

Its Origin and Nature 

There is but one work, so far as I can discover, formally devoted 
to American slang , 1 and that work is extremely superficial. More¬ 
over, it has been long out of date, and hence is of little save 
historical value. There are at least a dozen careful treatises on 
French slang, half as many on English slang , 2 and a good many on 
German slang, but American slang, which is probably quite as rich 
as that of France and a good deal richer than that of any other 
country, is yet to be studied at length. Nor is there much discussion 
of it, of any interest or value, in the general philological literature. 
Fowler and all the other early native students of the language dis¬ 
missed it with lofty gestures; down to the time of Whitney it was 
scarcely regarded as a seemly subject for the notice of a man of 
learning. Lounsbury, less pedantic, viewed its phenomena more 
hospitably, and even defined it as “the source from which the decay¬ 
ing energies of speech are constantly refreshed,” and Brander 
Matthews, following him, has described its function as that of pro¬ 
viding “substitutes for the good words and true which are worn out 
by hard service.” 3 But that is about as far as the investigation 
has got. Krapp has some judicious paragraphs upon the matter in 
his “Modern English,” 4 there are a few scattered essays upon the 

Barnes Maitland: The American Slang Dictionary; Chicago, 1891. 

•The best of these, of course, is Farmer and Henley’s monumental Slang and 
Its Analogues, in seven volumes. 

•Matthews’ essay, The Function of Slang, is reprinted in Clapin’s Dictionary 
of Americanisms, pp. 565-581. 

4 P. 199 ff. 


369 


370 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


underlying psychology , 5 and various superficial magazine articles, 
but that is all. The practising authors of the country, like its philo- 
logians, have always shown a gingery and suspicious attitude. “The 
use of slang,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes, “is at once a sign and a 
cause of mental atrophy.” “Slang,” said Ambrose Bierce fifty years 
later, “is the speech of him who robs the literary garbage cans on 
their way to the dumps.” Literature in America, as we have seen, 
remains aloof from the vulgate. Despite the contrary examples of 
Mark Twain and Howells, all of the more pretentious American 
authors try to write chastely and elegantly; the typical literary 
product of the country is still a refined essay in the Atlantic Monthly 
manner, perhaps gently jocose but never rough—by Emerson, so to 
speak, out of Charles Lamb—the sort of thing one might look to be 
done by a somewhat advanced English curate. George Ade, undoubt¬ 
edly one of the most adept anatomists of the American character and 
painters of the American scene that the national literature has yet 
developed, is neglected because his work is grounded firmly upon 
the national speech—not that he reports it literally, like Lardner and 
the hacks trailing after Lardner, but that he gets at and exhibits its 
very essence. It would stagger a candidate for a doctorate in phil¬ 
ology, I daresay, to be told off by his professor to investigate the slang 
of Ade in the way that Bosson , 6 the Swede, has investigated that of 
Jerome K. Jerome, and yet, until something of the sort is under¬ 
taken, Aanerican philology will remain out of contact with the Ameri¬ 
can language. 

Most of the existing discussions of slang spend themselves upon 
efforts to define it, and, in particular, upon efforts to differentiate 
it from idiomatic neologisms of a more legitimate type. This effort 
is largely in vain; the border-line is too vague and wavering to be 
accurately mapped; words and phrases are constantly crossing it, 
and in both directions. There was a time, perhaps, when the familiar 
American counter-word, 'proposition, was slang; its use seems to have 
originated in the world of business, and it was soon afterward adopted 

6 For example, The Psychology of Unconventional Language, by Frank K. 
Sechrist, Pedagogical Seminary, vol. xx, p. 413, Dec., 1913, and The Philosophy 
of Slang, by E. B. Taylor, reprinted in Clapin’s Dictionary of Americanisms, 
pp. 541-563. 

"Olaf E. Bosson: Slang and Cant in Jerome K. Jerome’s Works: Cambridge, 
1911. 




AMERICAN SLANG 


371 


by the sporting fraternity. But today it is employed without much 
feeling that it needs apology, and surely without any feeling that 
it is low. Nice, as an adjective of all work, was once in slang use 
only; today no one would question “a nice day,” or “a nice time,” or 
“a nice hotel.” Awful seems to be going the same route. “Awful 
sweet” and “awfully dear” still seem slangy and school-girlish, but 
“awful children” and “awful job” have entirely sound support, and 
no one save a pedant would hesitate to use them. Such insidious 
purifications and consecrations of slang are going on under our noses 
all the time. The use of some as a general adjective-adverb seems 
likely to make its way in the same manner, and so does the use of 
hick as verb and noun. It is constantly forgotten by purists of de¬ 
fective philological equipment that a great many of our respectable 
words and phrases originated in the plainest sort of slang. Thus, 
quandary, despite a fanciful etymology which would identify it 
with wandreth (= evil), is probably simply a composition form of 
the French phrase, quen dirai-je? Again, to turn to French itself, 
there is tele, a sound name for the human head for many centuries, 
though its origin was in the Latin testa (= pot), a favorite slang 
word of the soldiers of the decaying empire, analogous to our own 
block, nut and conch. The word slacker, now in good usage 
in the United States as a designation for a successful shirker 
of conscription, is a substantive derived from the English verb to 
slack, which was bora as university slang and remains so to this day. 
Brander Matthews, so recently as 1901, thought to hold up slang; 
it is now perfectly good American. 

The contrary movement of words from the legitimate vocabulary 
into slang is constantly witnessed. Some one devises a new and 
arresting trope or makes use of an old one under circumstances 
arresting the public attention, and at once it is adopted into slang, 
given a host of remote significances, and ding-donged ad nauseam. 
The Rooseveltian phrases, muck-raker, Ananias Club, short and ugly 
word, nature-faker and big-stick, offer examples. Not one of them 
was new and not one of them was of much pungency, but Roosevelt’s 
vast talent for delighting the yokelry threw about them a charming 
air, and so they entered into current slang and were mouthed idiot¬ 
ically for months. Another example is to be found in steam-roller , 


372 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


It was first heard of in American politics in June, 1908, when it 
was applied by Oswald F. Schuette, of the Chicago Inter-Ocean, to 
the methods employed by the Roosevelt-Taft majority in the Re¬ 
publican Rational Committee in over-riding the protests against 
seating Taft delegates from Alabama and Arkansas. At once it 
struck the popular fancy and was soon in general use. All the usual 
derivatives appeared, to steam-roller, steam-rollered, and so on. 
Since then the term has gradually forced its way back into good 
usage, and even gone over to England. In the early days of the 
World War it actually appeared in the most solemn English reviews, 
and once or twice, I believe, in state papers. 

Much of the discussion of slang by popular etymologists is de¬ 
voted to proofs that this or that locution is not really slang at all— 
that it is to be found in Shakespeare, in Milton, or in the Authorized 
Version. These scientists, of course, overlook the plain fact that 
slang, like the folk-song, is not the creation of people in the mass, 
but of definite individuals, 7 and that its character as slang depends 
entirely upon its adoption by the ignorant, who use its novelties too 
assiduously and with too little imagination, and so debase them 
to the estate of worn-out coins, smooth and valueless. It is this 
error, often shared by philologists of sounder information, that lies 
under the doctrine that the plays of Shakespeare are full of slang, 
and that the Bard showed but a feeble taste in language. Nothing 
could be more absurd. The business of writing English, in his day, 
was unharassed by the proscriptions of purists, and so the vocabu¬ 
lary could be enriched more facilely than today, but though Shake¬ 
speare and his fellow-dramatists quickly adopted such neologisms as 
to bustle, to huddle, bump, hubbub and pat, it goes without saying 
that they exercised a sound discretion and that the slang of the 
Bankside was full of words and phrases which they were never 
tempted to use. In our own day the same discrimination is exer¬ 
cised by all writers of sound taste. On the one hand they disregard 
the senseless prohibitions of schoolmasters, and on the other hand 
they draw the line with more or less watchfulness, according as they 
are of conservative or liberal habit. I find the best of the bunch and 

*Cf. Poetic Origins and the Ballad, by Louise Pound; New York, 1921. 


AMERICAN SLANG 


373 


jolce-smitK in Saintsbury; 8 one could scarcely imagine either in 
Walter Pater. But by the same token one could not imagine chicken 
(for young girl), 9 aber nit j to come across or to camouflage in Saintsr- 
bury. 

' Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xii, p. 144. 

8 Roughly equivalent to the English flapper, the French ingenue and the 
German backfisch. In 1921 chicken was suddenly abandoned and flapper 
adopted in its place, and with the change came an acute consciousness of the 
fair creature herself. Perhaps it was largely due to the popular success of 
T. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, This Side of Paradise; New York, 1920. At all 
events the newspapers began to be filled with discussions of the flappers’ indis¬ 
cretions, both in conduct and in language, and this interest presently extended 
to England. I set down some of the new slang thus dredged up: 

bell-polisher: a young man addicted to lingering in the vestibule after 
bringing his inamorata home. 

biscuit: a flapper willing to be petted. 
brush-ape: a young man from the country. 
boffos: dollars. 

oake-eater: a poor young man who frequents teas and other entertainments, 
but makes no attempt to repay his social obligations. 
oat’8 pajamas: anything that is good. 

cellar-smeller: a young man who always turns up where drinks are to be 
had free. 

olothesline: a retailer of neighborhood secrets. 
crape-hanger: a reformer. 

crasher: one who comes to parties uninvited. 

crashing-party: a party where many of the young men have come uninvited. 

dewdropper: a young man who does not work, but sleeps all day. 

dim-bow: a taxicab. 

dinoher: a half-smoked cigarette. 

dumdora: a stupid flapper. 

dudd: one given to reading or study. 

duck’s quack: something superior even to the cat’s pajamas, 
fire-alarm: a divorced woman. 

egg: a swain who lets his girl pay her own way into a dance-hall. 
egg-harbor: a dance at which no admission is charged. 

finale-hopper: the spendthrift who arrives after the ticket-takers have de¬ 
parted. 

fiat-wheeler: one who takes his girl to an egg-harbor. 

Father Time: a man above thirty. 

goof: a sweetheart. 

goofy: to be in love. 

grummy: in the dumps. 

grease-ball: a foreigner. 

handcuff: an engagement ring. 

hush-money: allowance from father. 

ironsides: a girl who wears corsets when dancing. 

low-lid: the opposite of a high-brow. 

lallygagger: a young man who attempts spooning in hallways. 
mad-money: money reserved to pay a flapper’s way home in case she quarrels 
with her beau. 

necker: one given to cheek-to-cheek dancing. 
nice-girl: one who introduces her beau to her family. 
out on parole: divorced. 
ritz: stuck up. 

strike-breaker: a flapper who goes to dances with her friend’s beau during 
a coolness. 


374 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


Wliat slang actually consists of doesn’t depend, in truth, upon 
intrinsic qualities, but upon the surrounding circumstances. It is 
the user that determines the matter, and particularly the user’s 
habitual way of thinking. If he chooses words carefully, with a full 
understanding of their meaning and savor, then no word that he 
uses seriously will belong to slang, but if his speech is made up 
chiefly of terms poll-parroted, and he has no sense of their shades 
and limitations, then slang will bulk largely in his vocabulary. In 
its origin it is nearly always respectable; it is devised, not by the 
stupid populace, but by individuals of wit and ingenuity; as Whitney 
says, it is a product of an “exuberance of mental activity, and the 
natural delight of language-making.” But when its inventions hap¬ 
pen to strike the popular fancy and are adopted by the mob, they 
are soon worn thread-bare and so lose all piquancy and significance, 
and, in Whitney’s words, become “incapable of expressing anything 
that is real.” 10 This is the history of such slang phrases, often 
interrogative, as “How’d you like to be the ice-man ?” “How’s your 
poor feet ?” “Merci pour la langouste,” “Have a heart,” “This is 
the life,” “Where did you get that hat ?” “Would you for fifty 
cents?” “Let her go, Gallagher,” “Shoo-fly, don’t bother me,” “Don’t 
wake him up” and “Let George do it.” The last well exhibits the 
process. It originated in France, as “Laissez faire a Georges,” dur¬ 
ing the fifteenth century, and at the start had satirical reference 
to the multiform activities of Cardinal Georges d’Amboise, prime 
minister to Louis XII . 11 It later became common slang, was trans¬ 
lated into English, had a revival during the early days of David 
shellacked: intoxicated. 

smoke-eater: a flapper who smokes to excess. 

tomato: a good-looking flapper who dances well but is opposed to petting, 
t oally: a smartly dressed young man. 
weasel: a scandal-monger. 
wind-sucker: a braggart. 

It is difficult to say, of course, how much of this slang was really in use 
and how much was simply invented by newspaper reporters. Incidentally, it 
should be noticed that flapper has undergone a considerable change of meaning 
in the United States. In England it means an innocent miss; here the concept 
of innocence is not in it. 

10 The Life and Growth of Language; New York, 1897, p. 113. 

11 Cf. Two Children in Old Paris, by Gertrude Slaughter; New York, 1918, 
p. 233. Another American popular saying, once embodied in a coon song, may 
be traced to a sentence in the prayer of the Old Dessauer before the battle of 
Kesseldorf, Dec. 15, 1745: “Or if Thou wilt not help me, don’t help those 
Hundvogte.” 


AMERICAN SLANG 


375 


Lloyd George’s career, was adopted into American without any com¬ 
prehension of either its first or its latest significance, and enjoyed 
the brief popularity of a year. 

Krapp attempts to distinguish between slang and sound idiom 
by setting up the doctrine that the former is “more expressive than 
the situation demands.” “It is,” he says, “a kind of hyperesthesia 
in the use of language. To laugh in your sleeve is idiom because 
it arises out of a natural situation; it is a metaphor derived from 
the picture of one raising his sleeve to his face to hide a smile, a 
metaphor which arose naturally enough in early periods when sleeves 
were long and flowing; but to talk through your hat is slang, not 
only because it is new, but also because it is a grotesque exaggeration 
of the truth.” 12 The theory, unluckily, is combated by many plain 
facts. To hand it to him, to get away with it and even to hand him 
a lemon are certainly not metaphors that transcend the practicable 
and probable, and yet all are undoubtedly slang. On the other hand, 
there is palpable exaggeration in such phrases as “he is not worth 
the powder it would take to kill him,” in such adjectives as break- 
bone (fever), and in such compounds as fire-eater, and yet it would 
be absurd to dismiss them as slang. Between block-head and bone- 
head there is little to choose, but the former is sound English, 
whereas the latter is American slang. So with many familiar 
similes, e. g., like greased lightning, as scarce as hen's teeth; they 
are grotesque hyperboles, but surely not slang. 

The true distinction between slang and more seemly idiom, in so 
far as any distinction exists at all, is that indicated by Whitney. 
Slang originates in an effort, always by ingenious individuals, to 
make the language more vivid and expressive. When in the form 
of single words it may appear as new metaphors, e. g., bird and 
peach; as back formations, e. g., beaut and flu; as composition- 
forms, e. g., whatdyecallem and attaboy; as picturesque compounds, 
e. g., booze-foundry; as onomatopes, e. g., biff and zowie; or in any 
other of the shapes that new terms take. If, by the chances that 
condition language-making, it acquires a special and limited mean¬ 
ing, not served by any existing locution, it enters into sound idiom 
and is presently wholly legitimatized; if, on the contrary, it is 
u Modern English, p. 211. 


376 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


adopted by the populace as a counter-word and employed with such 
banal imitativeness that it soon loses any definite significance what¬ 
ever, then it remains slang and is avoided by the finical. An ex¬ 
ample of the former process is afforded by tommy-rot. It first ap¬ 
peared as English school-boy slang, but its obvious utility soon 
brought it into good usage. In one of Jerome K. Jerome’s books, 
“Paul Kelver,” there is the following dialogue: 

“The wonderful songs that nobody ever sings, the wonderful pictures that 
nobody ever paints, and all the rest of it. It’s tommy-rot /” 

“I wish you wouldn’t use slang.” 

“Well, you know what I mean. What is the proper word? Give it to me.” 

“I suppose you mean cant." 

“No, I don’t. Cant is something that you don’t believe in yourself. It’s 
tommy-rot; there isn’t any other word.” 

Nor was there any other word for hubbub and to dwindle in 
Shakespeare’s time; he adopted and dignified them because they 
met genuine needs. Hor was there any other satisfactory word for 
graft when it came in, nor for rowdy, nor for boom, nor for joy¬ 
ride, nor for omnibus-bill, nor for slacker, nor for trust-buster. Such 
words often retain a humorous quality; they are used satirically and 
hence appear but seldom in wholly serious discourse. But they 
have standing in the language nevertheless, and only a prig would 
hesitate to use them as Saintsbury used the best of the bunch and 
joke-smith. 

On the other hand, many an apt and ingenious neologism, by fall¬ 
ing too quickly into the gaping maw of the proletariat, is spoiled 
forthwith. Once it becomes, in Oliver Wendell Holmes’ phrase, “a 
cheap generic term, a substitute for differentiated specific expres¬ 
sions,” it quickly acquires such flatness that the fastidious flee it 
as a plague. One recalls many capital verb-phrases, thus ruined 
by unintelligent appreciation, e. g., to hand him a lemon, to freeze 
on to, to have the goods, to cut no ice, to give him the glad hand, to 
fall for it, and to get by. One recalls, too, some excellent substan¬ 
tives, e. g., dope and dub, and compounds, e. g., come-on and easy- 
mark, and verbs, e. g., to vamp. These are all quite as sound in 
structure as the great majority of our most familiar words and 
phrases to cut no ice, for example, is certainly as good as to butter 


AMERICAN SLANG 


377 


no parsnips —but their adoption by the ignorant and their endless 
use and misuse in all sorts of situations have left them tattered and 
obnoxious, and they will probably go the way, as Matthews says, of 
all the other “temporary phrases which spring up, one scarcely knows 
how, and flourish unaccountably for a few months, and then disap¬ 
pear forever, leaving no sign.” Matthews is wrong in two particu¬ 
lars here. They do not arise by any mysterious parthenogenesis, but 
come from sources which, in many cases, may be determined. And 
they last, alas, a good deal more than a month. Shoo-fly afflicted the 
American people for at least two years, and “I don’t think” and 
aber nit quite as long. Even “good-night” lasted a whole year. 

A very large part of our current slang is propagated by the news¬ 
papers, and much of it is invented by newspaper writers. One need 
but turn to the slang of baseball to find numerous examples. Such 
phrases as to clout the sphere, the initial sack, to slam the pill and the 
dexter meadow are obviously not of bleachers manufacture. There 
is not enough imagination in that depressing army to devise such 
things; more often than not, there is not even enough intelligence 
to comprehend them. The true place of their origin is the perch 
of the newspaper reporters, whose competence and compensation is 
largely estimated, at least on papers of wide circulation, by their 
capacity for inventing novelties. The supply is so large that connois- 
seurship has grown up; an extra-fecund slang-maker on the press 
has his following. During the summer of 1913 the Chicago Record- 
Herald, somewhat alarmed by the extravagant fancy of its baseball 
reporters, asked its readers if they would prefer a return to plain 
English. Such of them as were literate enough to send in their 
votes were almost unanimously against a change. As one of them 
said, “one is nearer the park when Schulte slams the pills than when 
he merely hits the ball.” In all other fields the newspapers originate 
and propagate slang, particularly in politics. Most of our political 
slang-terms since the Civil War, from pork-barrel to steam-roller, 
have been their inventions. The English newspapers, with the ex¬ 
ception of a few anomalies such as Pink-Un, lean in the other di¬ 
rection; their fault is not slanginess, but an otiose ponderosity—in 
Dean Alford’s words, “the insisting on calling common things by 
uncommon names; changing our ordinary short Saxon nouns and 


378 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


verbs for long words derived from the Latin.” 13 The American 
newspapers, years ago, passed through such a stage of bombast, but 
since the invention of yellow journalism by the elder James Gordon 
Bennett—that is, the invention of journalism for the frankly igno¬ 
rant and vulgar—they have gone to the other extreme. Edmund 
Clarence Stedman noted the change soon after the Civil War. “The 
whole country,” he wrote to Bayard Taylor in 1873, “owing to the 
contagion of our newspaper ‘exchange’ system, is flooded, deluged, 
swamped beneath a muddy tide of slang.” 14 A thousand alarmed 
watchmen have sought to stay it since, but in vain. The great 
majority of our newspapers, including all those of large circulation, 
are chiefly written, as one observer says, “not in English, but in a 
strange jargon of words that would have made Addison or Milton 
shudder in despair.” 16 


2 . 


War Slang 

“During the war,” says a writer in the New York Tribune, “our 
army was slow in manufacturing words. . . . The English army 
invented not only more war slang than the American, but much 
more expressive slang. In fact, we took over a number of their 
words, such as dud, cootie and bus (for aeroplane). . . . During 
the first year of [American participation in] the war the Americans 
had no slang word for German. Hun was used sparingly, but only 
by officers. Fritzie was rare. Boche was tried, but proved to be 
ill adapted to Americans. They seemed afraid of it, and, indeed, 
it was often pronounced botch. Finally, after a year all these 
foreign substitutes were abandoned by the enlisted men, and the 
German became Jerry. Curiously enough, the word was almost 
invariably used in the singular. We heard a soldier telling about 
a patrol encounter in which he and twenty companions had driven 

“A Plea for the Queen’s English, p. 244. 

14 Life and Letters of E. C. Stedman, ed. by Laura Stedman and George M. 
Gould; New York, 1910, vol. i, p. 477. 

16 Governor M. R. Patterson, of Tennessee, in an address before the National 
Anti-Saloon League, Washington, Dec. 13, 1917. 


AMERICAN SLANG 


379 


a slightly larger German force out of an abandoned farmhouse, and 
he said: ‘When we came over the top of the hill we found Jerry / 
He stuck to that usage all through the story. In the last year of 
the war the American army began to find names for various things, 
but the slang list of the first year was short. The French army was 
the most prolific of all in language, and several large dictionaries of 
French trench slang have already been published.” 

The chief cause of this American backwardness is not far to seek. 
During the first year of American participation in the war few 
Americans got to France, and those who did found an enormous 
army of Britishers already in the field. These Britishers, in their 
three years of service, had developed a vast vocabulary of slang, and 
it stood ready for use. Naturally enough, some of it was borrowed 
forthwith, though not much. When the main American army fol¬ 
lowed in 1918 there was little need to make extensive additions to 
it. Frog, for Frenchman, was entirely satisfactory; why substitute 
anything else? So was cootie. So was bus. So were blimp, Jack 
Johnson, whizz-bang, to strafe and pill-box. Whatever was needed 
further was taken over from the vocabulary of the Regular Army or 
adapted from everyday American slang. Thus, handshaker came to 
mean a soldier sycophantic to officers, to bust was used for to demote, 
hard-boiled and buck-private (usually shortened to buck ) came into 
use and the cowboy outfit was borrowed for general military pur¬ 
poses. Most of the remaining slang that prevailed among the troops 
was derisory, e. g., Sears-Roebuck for a new lieutenant, loot for 
lieutenant, Jewish cavalry for the Quartermaster’s force, belly-rob¬ 
ber for the mess-sergeant, punk for bread, canned-monkey for the 
French canned beef, gold-fish for canned salmon. Much that re¬ 
mained was obscene, and had its origin in the simple application of 
obscene verbs and adjectives, long familiar, to special military uses. 
In the “Vocabulary of the A. E. F.” compiled by E. A. Hecker and 
Edmund Wilson, Jr., 16 fully 25 per cent, of the terms listed show 
more or less indecency; the everyday speech of the troops was 
extraordinarily dirty. But in this department, as I say, there were 

1# It remains unpublished, but the compilers have kindly placed it at my 
disposal. 



380 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


very few new coinages. In all departments, in truth, the favorite 
phrases were not invented in the field but brought from home, 
e. g., corp for corporal, sarge for sergeant, to salvage for to steal, chow 
for food. Even gob, doughboy and leatherneck were not new. Gob 
and leatherneck had been in use in the navy for a long while, though 
the common civilian designation for a sailor had been jackie. The 
origin of the terms is much disputed. Gob is variously explained 
as a derivative from the Chinese (?) word gobshite, and as the old 
word gob, signifying a large, irregular mass, applied to a new use. 
The original meaning of gobshite I don’t know. One correspondent 
suggests that gob was first used to designate sailors because of their 
somewhat voracious and noisy habits of feeding. He tells a story 
of an old master-at-arms who happened into a land aero-station and 
found a party of sailors solemnly at table. “My Gawd,” he ex¬ 
claimed, “lookit the gobs, usin’ forks an’ all!” Doughboy was origi¬ 
nally applied to the infantry only. It originated in the fact that 
infantrymen formerly pipe-clayed parts of their uniforms; the 
pipe-clay became a dough-like mass when it rained. Leatherneck 
needs no explanation. It obviously refers to the sunburn suf¬ 
fered by marines in the tropics. Hard-boiled is one of the few 
specimens of army slang that shows any sign of surviving in the 
general speech. The only others that I can think of are cootie, gob, 
leatherneck, doughboy, frog, and buck-private. Hand-shaker, since 
the war ended, has resumed its old meaning of an excessively affable 
man. Top-sergeant, during the war, suffered an interesting philo¬ 
logical change, like that already noticed in buncombe. First it 
degenerated to top-sarge and then to plain top. To a. w. o. 1. is 
already almost forgotten. So is bevo officer. So are such charming 
inventions as submarine for bed-pan. The favorite affirmations of 
the army, “I’ll say so,” “I’ll tell the world,” “You said it,” etc., 
are also passing out. From the French, save for a few grotesque 
mispronunciations of common French phrases, e. g., boocoop, the 
doughboys seem to have borrowed nothing whatsoever. To camouflage 
was already in use in the United States long before the country 
entered the war, and such aviation terms as ace, chandelle, vrille 

9 

and glissade were seldom heard outside the air-force. 

The war-slang of the English, the French and the Germans was 


AMERICAN SLANG 


381 


enormously richer, and a great deal more of it has survived. One 
need but glance at the vocabulary in the last edition of Cassell’s 
Dictionary 17 or at such works as Gaston Esnault’s “Le Poilu Tel 
Qu’il se Parle ” 18 or Karl Bergmann’s “Wie der Feldgraue 
Spricht” 19 to note the great difference. The only work which pre¬ 
tends to cover the subject of American war-slang is “New Words 
Self-Defined,” by Prof. C. Alphonso Smith, of the Naval Acad¬ 
emy . 20 It is pieced out with much English slang, and not a little 
French slang. 

1T London, 1919. 

18 Paris, 1919. 

19 Giessen, 1916. 

80 New York, 1919. 


XII. 


THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 


1 . 

English as a World Language 

The great Jakob Grimm, the founder of comparative philology, 
hazarded the guess more than three-quarters of a century ago that 
English would one day become the chief language of the world, 
and perhaps crowd out several of the then principal idioms alto¬ 
gether. “In wealth, wisdom and strict economy,” he said, “none 
of the other living languages can vie with it.” At that time the 
guess was bold, for English was still in fifth place, with not only 
French and German ahead of it, but also Spanish and Russian. In 
1801, according to Michael George Mulhall, the relative standing of 
the five, in the number of persons using them, was as follows: 

French . 31,450,000 

Russian . 30,7710^000 

German . 30,320,000 

Spanish . 26,190,000 

English . 20,520,000 1 

’Jespersen, in his Growth and Structure of the English Language, p. 244, 
lists a number of estimates for previous periods. At the beginning of the six¬ 
teenth century English was variously estimated to be spoken by from four to 
five millions of persons, German by ten, Russian by three, French by from ten 
to twelve, Spanish by eight and a half and Italian by nine and a half. French 
was thus in first place, closely followed by German, with English fifth. In the 
year 1600 English was spoken by six millions, German by ten, Russian by three, 
French by fourteen, Spanish by eight and a half, and Italian by nine and a half. 
The six languages thus ranked exactly as they had ranked a century before, but 
with French showing a greatly increased lead, and English slowly spreading. In 
the year 1700 the various estimates were: English, eight and a half millions; 
German, ten; Russian, from three to fifteen; French, twenty; Spanish, eight 
and a half; Italian, from nine and a half to eleven. Jespersen shows that 
Mulhall’s estimate, given above, differed a good deal from that of other statis¬ 
ticians. The guesses made in the year 1800 and thereabout ranged as follows: 
English, twenty to forty; German, thirty to thirty-three; Russian, twenty-five 
to thirty-one; French, twenty-seven to thirty-one; Spanish, twenty-six; Italian, 
fourteen to fifteen. Mulhall did not list Italian. 

382 







THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 


383 


The population of the United States was then but little more 
than 5,000,000, but in twenty years it had nearly doubled, and 
thereafter it increased steadily and enormously, until by 1860 it had 
become greater than that of the United Kingdom. Since that time 
the majority of English-speaking persons in the world have lived on 
this side of the water; today there are nearly three times as many here 
as in the United Kingdom and nearly twice as many as in the whole 
British Empire. This enormous increase in the American popula¬ 
tion, beginning with the great immigrations of the 30’s and 40’s, 
quickly lifted English to fourth place among the languages, and 
then to third, to second and to first. When it took the lead the 
attention of philologists was actively directed to the matter, and in 
1868 one of them, a German named Brackebusch, first seriously 
raised the question whether English was destined to obliterate cer¬ 
tain of the older tongues. 2 Brackebusch decided against it on 
various philological grounds, none of them particularly sound. His 
own figures, as the following table from his dissertation shows, 3 * S 
were rather against him: 


English 

German 

Russian 

French 

Spanish 


60,000,000 

62,000,000 

45,000,000 

45,000,000 

40,000,000 


This is 1868. Before another generation had passed the lead of 
English, still because of the great growth of the United States, had 
become yet more impressive, as the following figures for 1890 show: 

English . 111,100,000 

German . 75,200,000 

Russian . 75,000,000 

2 Long before this the general question of the relative superiority of various 
languages had been debated in Germany. In 1796 the Berlin Academy offered a 
prize for the best essay on The Ideal of a Perfect Language. It was won by one 
Jenisch with a treatise bearing the sonorous title of A Philosophical-Critical 
Comparison and Estimate of Fourteen of the Ancient and Modern Languages of 

Europe, viz., Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, 

English, Danish, Swedish, Polish, Russian and Lithuanian. 

S ls English Destined to Become the Universal Language? by W. Brackebusch; 
Gottingen, 1868. 










384 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


French .., 
Spanish .. 
Italian .. 
Portuguese 


51,200,000 

42,800,000 

33,400,000 

13,000,000 


The next estimates, for the year 1900, I take from Jespersen. 
The statisticians responsible for them I do not know: 


English .from 116,000,000 to 123,000,000 

German .from 75,000,000 to 80,000,000 

Russian .from 70,000,000 to 85,000,000 

French .from 45,000,000 to 52,000,000 

Spanish .from 44,000,000 to 58,000,000 

Italian .from 34,000,000 to 54,000,000 


Now comes an estimate as of 1911: 5 


English •. . 
German .. 
Russian ., 
French ... 
Spanish .. 
Italian .. 
Portuguese 


160,000,000 

130,000,000 

100,000,000 

70,000,000 

50,000,000 

50,000,000 

25,000,000 


And now one, somewhat more moderate, as of 1912: 


English . 150,000,000 

German . 90,000,000 

Russian . 106,000,000 

French . 47,000,000 

Spanish . 52,000,000 

Italian . 37,000,000 ’ 


If we accept the 1911 estimate, we find English spoken by two 
and a half times as many persons as spoke it at the close of the Civil 
War and by nearly eight times as many as spoke it at the begin¬ 
ning of the nineteenth century. No other language spread to any 
such extent during the century. German made a fourfold gain, but 
that was just half the gain made by English. Russian, despite the 
vast extension of the Russian Empire during the century, scarcely 

4 1 take these figures from A Modern English Grammar, by H. G. Buehler; 
New York, 1900, p. 3. 

* World Almanac, 1914, p. 63. See also English, March, 1919, p. 20. 

• Hickmann’s Geographisch-Statistischer Universal-Atlas. 

























THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 


385 


more than tripled its users, and French barely doubled them. Per¬ 
haps all of the figures in the table are excessive; that is almost 
certainly true of German, and probably also true of English and 
French. The same authority, in 1921, modified them as follows: 


English .. 
German .. 
Russian .. 
French .. 
Spanish .. 
Italian .. 
Portuguese 


150,000,000 

120,000,000 

90,000,000 

60,000,000 

55,000,000 

40,000,000 

30,000,000 


I am inclined to think that the German estimate is still far too 
high; probably even Hickmann’s 90,000,000 is too liberal. The 
number of Germans in Germany is about 60,000,000 and in Ger¬ 
man Austria not more than 6,000,000 or 7,000,000. Add the 
German-speaking inhabitants of Holstein, Alsace-Lorraine, Czecho¬ 
slovakia, Silesia and the Dantzig territory: perhaps 3,000,000 
more. Then the German-speaking peoples of the Baltic region, of 
Transylvania and of Russia: at most, 2,000,000. Then the German¬ 
speaking colonists in North and South America: 2,000,000 or 3,000,- 
000 more. Altogether, I put the number of living users of German 
at less than 75,000,000, which is probably no more than half of 
the number of living users of English. Japanese, I daresay, should 
follow French: it is spoken by at least 60,000,000 persons. But it 
seems to be making very little progress and its difficulties put it out 
of consideration as a world language. Chinese, too, may be disre¬ 
garded, for though it is spoken by more than 300,000,000 persons, 
it is split into half a dozen mutually unintelligible dialects and 
shows no sign of spreading beyond the limits of China; in fact, it 
is yielding to other languages along the borders, especially to Eng¬ 
lish in the seaports. The same may be said of Hindustani, which 
is the language of 100,000,000 inhabitants of British India; it shows 
wide dialectical variations and the people who speak it are not likely 
to spread. But English is the possession of a race that is still push¬ 
ing in all directions, and wherever that race settles the existing lan¬ 
guages tend to succumb. Thus French, despite the passionate re- 

T World, Almanac, 1921, p. 145. 









386 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


sistance of the French-Canadians, is gradually decaying in Canada; 
in all newly-settled regions English is universal. And thus Spanish 
is dying out in our own Southwest, and promises to meet with severe 
competition in some of the nearer parts of Latin-America. The 
English control of the sea has likewise carried the language into far 
places. There is scarcely a merchant ship-captain on deep water, of 
whatever nationality, who does not find some acquaintance with it 
necessary, and it has become, in debased forms, the lingua franca 
of Oceanica and the Far East generally. “Three-fourths of the 
world’s mail matter,” says E. H. Babbitt, “is now addressed in 
English,” and “more than half of the world’s newspapers are printed 
in English.” 8 

Brackebusch, in the speculative paper just mentioned, came to 
the conclusion that the future domination of English would be pre¬ 
vented by its unphonetic spelling, its grammatical reduction and the 
general difficulties that a foreigner encounters in seeking to master 
it. “The simplification of its grammar,” he said, with true philo¬ 
logical fatuity, “is the commencement of dissolution, the beginning 
of the end, and its extraordinary tendency to degenerate into slang 
of every kind is the foreshadowing of its approaching dismember¬ 
ment.” But in the same breath he was forced to admit that “the 
greater development it has obtained” was the result of this very 
simplification of grammar, and an inspection of the rest of his 
reasoning quickly shows its unsoundness, even without an appeal 
to the plain facts. The spelling of a language, whether it be phonetic 
or not, has little to do with its spread. Very few men learn it by 
studying books; they learn it by hearing it spoken. As for gram¬ 
matical reduction, it is not a sign of dissolution, but a sign of active 
life and constantly renewed strength. To the professional philologist, 
perhaps it may sometimes appear otherwise. He is apt to estimate 
languages by looking at their complexity; the Greek aorist elicits 
his admiration because it presents enormous difficulties and is in¬ 
ordinately subtle. But the object of language is not to bemuse 
grammarians, but to convey ideas, and the more simply it accom- 

*The Geography of Great Languages, World’s Work, Feb., 1908, p. 9907. 
Babbitt predicts that by the year 2000 English will be spoken by 1,100,000,000 
persons, as against 500,000,000 speakers of Russian, 300,000,000 of Spanish, 
160,000,000 of German and 60,000,000 of French. 



THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 


387 


plislies that object the more effectively it meets the needs of an 
energetic and practical people and the larger its inherent vitality. 
The history of every language of Europe, since the earliest days 
of which we have record, is a history of simplifications. Even such 
languages as German, which still cling to a great many exasperating 
inflections, including the absurd inflection of the article for gender, 
are less highly inflected than they used to be, and are proceeding 
slowly but surely toward analysis. The fact that English has gone 
further along that road than any other civilized tongue is not a 
proof of its decrepitude, hut a proof of its continued strength. 
Brought into free competition with another language, say German 
or French or Spanish, it is almost certain to prevail, if only because 
it is vastly easier—that is, as a spoken language—to learn. The 
foreigner essaying it, indeed, finds his chief difficulty, not in mas¬ 
tering its forms, hut in grasping its lack of forms. He doesn’t have 
to learn a new and complex grammar; what he has to do is to forget 
grammar. 

Once he has done so, the rest is a mere matter of acquiring a 
vocabulary. He can make himself understood, given a few nouns, 
pronouns, verbs and numerals, without troubling himself in the 
slightest about accidence. “Me see she” is bad English, perhaps, 
but it would he absurd to say that it is obscure—and on some not 
too distant tomorrow it may be very fair American. Essaying an 
inflected language, the beginner must go into the matter far more 
deeply before he may hope to be understood. Bradley, in “The 
Making of English,” 9 shows clearly how German and English differ 
in this respect, and how great is the advantage of English. In the 
latter the verb sing has but eight forms, and of these three are 
entirely obsolete, one is obsolescent, and two more may he dropped 
out without damage to comprehension. In German the correspond¬ 
ing verb, singen, has no fewer than sixteen forms. How far English 
has proceeded toward the complete obliteration of inflections is shown 
by such barbarous forms of it as Pidgin English and Beach-la-Mar, 
in which the final step is taken without appreciable loss of clarity. 
The Pidgin English verb is identical in all tenses. Go stands for 
both went and gone; makee is both make and made. In the same 
•New York, 1915, p. 5 ff. 




388 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


way there is no declension of the pronoun for case. My is thus I, 
me, mine and our own my. “Ho belong my’ is “it is not mine,” a 
crude construction, of course, but still clearly intelligible. China¬ 
men learn Pidgin English in a few months, and savages in the 
South Seas master Beach-la-Mar almost as quickly. And a white 
man, once he has accustomed himself to either, finds it strangely 
fluent and expressive. He cannot argue politics in it, nor dispute 
upon transubstantiation, but for all the business of every day it is 
perfectly satisfactory. 

This capacity of English for clear and succinct utterance is fre¬ 
quently remarked by Continental philologists, many of whom seem 
inclined to agree with Grimm that it will eventually supersede all 
of the varying dialects now spoken in Europe, at least for commer¬ 
cial purposes. Jespersen, in the first chapter of his “Growth and 
Structure of the English Language,” 10 discusses the matter very 
penetratingly and at great length. “There is one impression,” he 
says, “that continually comes to my mind whenever I think of the 
English language and compare it with others: it seems to me posi¬ 
tively and expressively masculine; it is the language of a grown¬ 
up man and has very little childish or feminine about it. A great 
many things go together to produce and to confirm that impression, 
things phonetical, grammatical, and lexical, words and turns that 
are found, and words and turns that are not found, in the language.” 
He then goes on to explain the origin and nature of the “masculine” 
air: it is grounded chiefly upon clarity, directness and force. He 
says: 

The English consonants are well defined; voiced and voiceless consonants 
stand over against each other in neat symmetry, and they are, as a rule, clearly 
and precisely pronounced. You have none of those indistinct or half-slurred 
consonants that abound in Danish, for instance (such as those in hade, hagre, 
liulig), where you hardly know whether it is a consonant or a vowel-glide that 
meets the ear. The only thing that might be compared to this in English is 
the r when not followed by a vowel, but then this has really given up definitely 
all pretensions to the rank of a consonant, and is (in the pronunciation of the 
South of England)' 11 either frankly a vowel (as in here) or else nothing at all 
(in hart, etc.). Each English consonant belongs distinctly to its own type, a t 

“Third ed., rev.; Leipzig, 1919. 

11 But certainly not in that of the United States, save maybe in the South, 


THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 


389 


is a t, and a k is a k, and there is an end. There is much less modification of 
a consonant by the surrounding vowels than in some other languages; thus none 
of that palatalization of consonants which gives an insinuating grace to such 
languages as Russian. The vowel sounds, too, are comparatively independent of 
their surroundings; and in this respect the language now has deviated widely 
from the character of Old English, and has become more clear-cut and distinct 
in its phonetic structure, although, to be sure, the diphthongization of most 
long vowels (in ale, whole, eel, who, phonetically eil, houl, ijl, huw) counteracts 
in some degree this impression of neatness and evenness. 

Jespersen then proceeds to consider certain peculiarities of Eng¬ 
lish grammar and syntax, and to point out the simplicity and force¬ 
fulness of the everyday English vocabulary. The grammatical bald¬ 
ness of the language, he argues (against the old tradition in philol¬ 
ogy) , is one of the chief sources of its vigor. He says: 


Where German has, for instance, alle diejenigen wilden Here, die dort leben, 
so that the plural idea is expressed in each word separately (apart, of course, 
from the adverb), English has all the wild animals that live there, where all, 
the article, the adjective, and the relative pronoun are alike incapable of receiv¬ 
ing any mark of the plural number; the sense is expressed with the greatest 
clearness imaginable, and all the unstressed endings -e and -en, which make 
most German sentences so drawling, are avoided. 

The prevalence of very short words in English, and the syntactical 
law which enables it to dispense with the definite article in many 
constructions “where other languages think it indispensable, e.g., 
‘life is short/ ‘dinner is ready’ ”—these are further marks of vigor 
and clarity, according to Dr. Jespersen. “ ‘First come, first served/ ” 
he says, “is much more vigorous than the French ‘Premier venu, 
premier rnoulu’ or ‘Le Premier venu engrene/ the German ‘Wer 
zuerst kommt, mahlt zuerst/ and especially than the Danish ‘Den 
der kommer forst til molle, far forst malet’ ” Again, there is the 
superior logical sense of English—the arrangement of words, not 
according to grammatical rules, but according to their meaning. 
“In English,” says Dr. Jespersen, “an auxiliary verb does not stand 
far from its main verb, and a negative will be found in the imme¬ 
diate neighborhood of the word it negatives, generally the verb 
(auxiliary). An adjective nearly always stands before its noun; 
the only really important exception is when there are qualifications 
added to it which draw it after the noun so that the whole complex 



390 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


serves the purpose of a relative clause.” In English, the subject 
almost invariably precedes the verb and the object follows after. 
Once Dr. Jespersen had his pupils determine the percentage of 
sentences in various authors in which this order was observed. They 
found that even in English poetry it was seldom violated; the per¬ 
centage of observances in Tennyson’s poetry ran to 88. But in 
the poetry of Holger Drachmann, the Dane, it fell to 61, in Anatole 
France’s prose to 66, in Gabriele d’Annunxio to 49, and in the poetry 
of Goethe to 30. All these things make English clearer and more 
logical than other tongues. It is, says Dr. Jespersen, “a methodical, 
energetic, business-like and sober language, that does not care much 
for finery and elegance, but does care for logical consistency and is 
opposed to any attempt to narrow-in life by police regulations and 
strict rules either of grammar or of lexicon.” In these judgments 
another distinguished Danish philologist, Prof. Thomsen, agrees 
fully. 

There is, of course, something to be said on the other side. “Be¬ 
sides a certain ungainliness [Dr. Jespersen’s masculine quality],” 
said a recent writer in English, 12 “English labors under other grave 
disadvantages. The five vowels of our alphabet have to do duty for 
some twenty sounds, and, to the foreigner, there are no simple rules 
by which the correct vowel sounds may be gauged from the way a 
word is written; our orthography also reflects the chaotic period 
before our language was formed, and the spelling of a particular 
word is often unconnected with either its present pronunciation or 
correct derivation. And although our literature contains more great 
poetry than any other, and though our language was made by poets 
rather than by prose writers, English is not musical in the sense that 
Greek was, or that Italian is when sung.” But these objections 
have very little genuine force. The average foreigner does not learn 
English in order to sing it, but in order to speak it. And, as I have 
said, he does not learn it from books, but by word of mouth. To 
write it correctly, and particularly to spell it correctly, is a herculean 
undertaking, but very few foreigners find any need to do either. 
If our spelling were reformed, most of the difficulties now encoun¬ 
tered would vanish. 
u Feb., 1921, p. 450. 


THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 


391 


Meanwhile, it remains a plain fact that, if only because of the 
grammatical simplicity, it is easier to obtain an intelligible work¬ 
ing knowledge of English than of any other living tongue. This 
superior simplicity, added to the commercial utility of knowing the 
language, will probably more than counterbalance the nationalistic 
objections to acquiring it. In point of fact, they are already grown 
feeble. All over the Continent English is being studied by men of 
every European race, including especially the German. “During 
my recent stay in Berlin,” says a post-war English traveler, 13 “noth¬ 
ing annoyed me more than the frequency with which my inquiries 
of the man in the street for direction, made in atrocious German, 
elicited replies in perfect English.” This writer accounts for what 
he observed by the fact that “the English-speaking nations own half 
the world,” and asks, “what language should they study but Eng¬ 
lish?” But the spread of the language was already marked before 
the war. Another British subject, writing in 1910, 14 thus described 
its extension in the Far East, as observed during a trip to Japan: 

It was only on reaching Italy that I began fully to realize this wonderful 
thing, that for nearly six weeks, on a German ship, in a journey of nearly ten 
thousand miles, we had heard little of any language but English I 

It is an amazing thing when one thinks of it. 

In Japan most of the tradespeople spoke English. At Shanghai, at Hong 
Kong, at Singapore, at Penang, at Colombo, at Suez, at Port Said—all the way 
home to the Italian ports, the language of all the ship’s traffic, the language of 
such discourse as the passengers held with natives, most of the language on 
board ship itself, was English. 

The German captain of our ship spoke English more often than German. 
All his officers spoke English. 

The Chinese man-o’-war’s men who conveyed the Chinese prince on board at 
Shanghai, received commands and exchanged commands with our German sailors 
in English. The Chinese mandarins in their conversations with the ships’ 
officers invariably spoke English. They use the same ideographs in writing 
as the Japanese, but to talk to our Japanese passengers they had to speak 
English. Nay, coming as they did from various provinces of the Empire, where 
the language greatly differs, they found it most convenient in conversation 
among themselves to speak English! 

If, as some aver, the greatest hindrances to peaceful international intercourse 
are the misunderstandings due to diversity of tongues, the wide prevalence of 
the English tongue must be the greatest unifying bond the world has ever known. 

u John Cournos: English as Esperanto: Its Extraordinary Popularity in Cen¬ 
tral Europe, English, Feb., 1921, p. 451. 

14 Alexander M. Thompson: Japan for a Week; Britain Forever!; London, 1910. 



392 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


And it grows—it grows unceasingly. At the beginning of last century English 
was the native speech of little more than twenty million people. At the end of 
the century it was spoken by 130 millions. Before the year 2000 it will probably 
be spoken by 250 to 500 millions. 

In the most high and palmy state of Rome, the population of the Empire was 
less than 100 millions. To-day 350 millions own the sway of rulers who speak 
English. 


2 . 

English or American? 

Because of the fact that the American form of English is now 
spoken by three times as many persons as all the British forms taken 
together, and by at least twenty times as many as the standard 
Southern English, and because, no less, of the greater resilience it 
shows, and the greater capacity for grammatical and lexical growth, 
and the far greater tendency to accommodate itself to the linguistic 
needs and limitations of foreigners—because of all this it seems 
to me very likely that it will determine the final form of the lan¬ 
guage. For the old control of English over American to 1t>e reas- 
serted is now quite unthinkable; if the two dialects are not to drift 
apart entirely English must follow in American’s tracks. This 
yielding seems to have begun; the exchanges from American into 
English, as we have seen, grow steadily larger and more important 
than the exchanges from English into American. John Bichard 
Green, the historian, discerning the inevitable half a century ago, 
expressed the opinion, amazing and unpalatable then, that the Amer¬ 
icans were already “the main branch of the English people.” It 
is not yet wholly true; a cultural timorousness yet shows itself; 
there is still a class, chiefly of pedagogues and of social aspirants, 
which looks to England as the Romans long looked to Greece. But 
it is not the class that is shaping the national language, and it is 
not the class that is carrying it beyond the national borders. The 
Americanisms that flood the English of Canada are not borrowed 
from the dialects of New England Loyalists and fashionable New 
Yorkers, but from the common speech that has its sources in the 


THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 


393 


native and immigrant proletariat and that displays its gaudiest 
freightage in the newspapers. 

The impact of this flood is naturally most apparent in Canada, 
whose geographical proximity and common interests completely 
obliterate the effects of English political and social dominance. The 
American flat a has swept the whole country, and American slang 
is everywhere used; turn to any essay on Canadianisms, 15 and you 
will find that nine-tenths of them are simply Americanisms. No 
doubt this is chiefly due to the fact that the Canadian newspapers 
are all supplied with news by the American press associations, and 
thus fall inevitably into the habit of discussing it in American 
terms. “The great factor that makes us write and speak alike,” says 
a recent writer on American speech habits, 16 “is the indefinite multi¬ 
plication of the instantaneous uniformity of the American daily, 
. . . due to a non-sectional, continental exchange of news through 
the agency of the various press associations.” In this exchange 
Canada shares fully. Its people may think as Britons, but they 
must perforce think in American. 

More remarkable is the influence that American has exerted upon 
the speech of Australia and upon the crude dialects of Oceanica and 
the Ear East. One finds such obvious Americanisms as tomahawk, 
boss, bush, go finish (= to die ) and pickaninny in Beach-la-Mar 17 
and more of them in Pidgin English. The common trade speech of 
the whole Pacific, indeed, tends to become American rather than 
English. An American correspondent at Oxford sends me some 
curious testimony to the fact. Among the Britishers he met there 
was one student who showed an amazing familiarity with American 
words and phrases. The American, asking him where he had lived 
in the United States, was surprised to hear that he had never been 
here at all. All his Americanisms had been picked up during his 
youth in a Chinese sea-port, where his father was the British Consul. 

15 For example, Geikie’s or Lighthall’s. See the Bibliography. 

«Harvey M. Watts: Need of Good English Growing as World Turns to Its 
Use, New York Sun, Nov. 19, 1919. 

17 Cf. Beach-la-Mar, by William Churchill, former United States consul-general 
in Samoa and Tonga. The pamphlet is published by the Carnegie Institution of 
Washington. 





394 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


The English of Australia, though it is Cockney in pronunciation 
and intonation, 18 becomes increasingly American in vocabulary. In 
a glossary of Australianisms compiled by the Australian author, 
C. T. Dennis, 19 I find the familiar verbs and verb-phrases, 
to beef, to biff, to bluff, to boss, to break away, to chase one’s self, 
to chew the rag, to chip in, to fade away, to get it in the neck, to 
back and fill, to plug along, to get sore, to turn down and to get 
wise; the substantives, dope, boss, fake, creek, knockout-drops and 
push (in the sense of crowd ) ; the adjectives, hitched (in the sense 
of married) and tough (as before luck), and the adverbial phrases, 
for keeps and going strong. Here, in direct competition with Eng¬ 
lish locutions, and with all the advantages on the side of the latter, 
American is making steady progress. Moreover, the Australians, 20 
following the Americans, have completely obliterated several old 
niceties of speech that survive in England—for example, the dis¬ 
tinction between will and shall. “An Australian,” says a recent 
writer, 21 “uses the phrase I shall about as often as he uses the ac¬ 
cusative whom. Usually he says I will or I’ll; and the expectant 
we shall see is the only ordinary shall locution which I can call to 
mind.” But perhaps it is Irish influence that is visible here, and 
not American. 

“This American language,” says a recent observer, “seems to 
be much more of a pusher than the English. For instance, after eight 
years’ occupancy of the Philippines it was spoken by 800,000, or 10 
per cent, of the natives, while after an occupancy of 150 years of 
India by the British, 3,000,000, or one per cent, of the natives speak 
English.” 22 I do not vouch for the figures. They may be inac¬ 
curate, in detail, but they at least state what seems to be a fact. 


18 Cf. The Australian Accent, Triad (Sydney), Nov. 10, 1920, p. 37. 

19 It is in Doreen and the Sentimental Bloke; New York, 1916. 

20 It is a pity that American has not borrowed the Australian invention wowser. 
Says a writer in the Manchester Guardian: ( ‘Wowser, whether used as an adjec¬ 
tive or a substantive, covers everyone and everything that is out of sympathy 
with what some people consider la joie de vivre. A woioser, as a person, is one 
who desires to close public-houses, prevent shouting (Australese for treating), 
and so on—in short, one who intends to limit the opportunities ‘of all professions 
that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire.’ ” In the United States fully 
99 per cent of all the world’s wowsers rage and roar, and yet we have no simple 
word to designate them. 

21 English, Sept., 1919, p. 167. 

22 The American Language, by J. F. Healy; Pittsburgh, 1910, p. 6. 


THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 


395 


Behind that fact are phenomena which certainly deserve careful 
study, and, above all, study divested of unintelligent prejudice. The 
attempt to make American uniform with English has failed in- 
gloriously; the neglect of its investigation is an evidence of snob¬ 
bishness that is a folly of the same sort. It is useless to dismiss 
the growing peculiarities of the American vocabulary and of gram¬ 
mar and syntax in the common speech as vulgarisms beneath serious 
notice. Such vulgarisms have a way of intrenching themselves, and 
gathering dignity as they grow familiar. “There are but few forms 
in use/’ says Lounsbury, “which, judged by a standard previously 
existing, would not be regarded as gross barbarisms.” 23 Each lan¬ 
guage, in such matters, is a law unto itself, and each vigorous dialect, 
particularly if it be spoken by millions, is a law no less. “It would 
be as wrong,” says Sayce, “to use thou for the nominative thee in 
the Somersetshire dialect as it is to say thee art instead of you are 
in the Queen’s English.” American has suffered severely from the 
effort to impose an impossible artificiality upon it, but it has sur¬ 
vived the process, and soon or late there must be a formal abandon¬ 
ment of the pedagogical effort to bring it into agreement with South¬ 
ern English. “It has had held up to it,” says Prof. Ayres, “silly 
ideals, impossible ideals, ignorant dogmatisms, and for the most part 
it wisely repudiates them all.” 24 The American Academy of Arts 
and Letters still pleads for these silly ideals and ignorant dogma¬ 
tisms, and the more stupid sort of schoolmasters echo the plea, but 
meanwhile American goes its way. In England its progress is not 
unmarked. Dr. Robert Bridges and the Society for Pure English 
seek to bring about the precise change in standard English that 
American shows spontaneously. Maybe the end will be two dialects 
—standard English for pedants, and American for the world. 

As yet, American suffers from the lack of a poet bold enough to 
venture into it, as Chaucer ventured into the despised English of 
his day, and Dante into the Tuscan dialect, and Luther, in his 
translation of the Bible, into peasant German. Walt Whitman 
made a half attempt and then drew back; Lowell, perhaps, also 

23 History of the English Language, p. 476. 

34 Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. iv, p. 566. 



396 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


heard the call, but too soon; in our own time, young Mr. Weaver 
has shown what may be done tomorrow, and Carl Sandburg 
and Sherwood Anderson have also made experiments. The 
Irish dialect of English, vastly less important than the Ameri¬ 
can, has already had its interpreters—Douglas Hyde, John 
Millington Synge and Augusta Gregory—with what extraor¬ 
dinary results we all know. 25 Here we have writing that is 
still indubitably English, but English rid of its artificial re¬ 
straints and broken to the less self-conscious grammar and syntax of 
a simple and untutored folk. Synge, in his preface to “The Playboy 
of the Western World,” tells us how he got his gipsy phrases “through 
a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, 
that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the 
kitchen.” There is no doubt, he goes on, that “in the happy ages 
of literature striking and beautiful phrases were as ready to the 
story-teller’s or the playwright’s hand as the rich cloaks and dresses 
of his time. It is probable that when the Elizabethan dramatist 
took his ink-horn and sat down to his work he used many phrases 
that he had just heard, as he sat at dinner, from his mother or his 
children.” 

The result, in the case of the neo-Celts, is a dialect that stands 
incomparably above the tight English of the grammarians—a dialect 
so naive, so pliant, so expressive, and, adeptly managed, so beautiful 
that even purists have begun to succumb to it, and it promises to 
leave lasting marks upon English style. The American dialect has 
not yet come to that stage. In so far as it is apprehended at all it is 
only in the sense that Irish-English was apprehended a generation 
ago—that is, as something uncouth and comic. But that is the way 
that new dialects always come in—through a drum-fire of cackles. 
Given the poet, there may suddenly come a day when our theims 
and would’a Tiads will take on the barbaric stateliness of the peasant 
locutions of old Maurya in “Eiders to the Sea.” They seem gro¬ 
tesque and absurd today because the folks who use them seem 
grotesque and absurd. But that is a too facile logic and under it 

“The Sicilian dialect of Italian was brought to dignity in the same way by 
the late Giovanni Verga, author of the well-known Cavalleria Rusticana. See 
Giovanni Verga and the Sicilian Novel, by Carlo Linati, Dial, Aug., 1921, p. 150 ff. 



THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 


397 


is a false assumption. In all human beings, if only understanding 
be brought to the business, dignity will be found, and that dignity 
cannot fail to reveal itself, soon or late, in the words and phrases 
with which they make known their hopes and aspirations and cry 
out against the meaninglessness of life. 


APPENDIX 


I. 

Specimens of the American Vulgate 

1 . 

The Declaration of Independence in American 

[The following is my own translation, but I have had the aid of suggestions 
from various other scholars. It must be obvious that more than one section of 
the original is now quite unintelligible to the average American of the sort using 
the Common Speech. What would he make, for example, of such a sentence as 
this one: “lie has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncom¬ 
fortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole 
purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures”? Or of this: 
“He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be 
elected, whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned 
to the people at large for their exercise.” Such Johnsonian periods are quite 
beyond his comprehension, and no doubt the fact is at least partly to blame for 
the neglect upon which the Declaration has fallen in recent years. When, during 
the Wilson-Palmer saturnalia of oppressions, specialists in liberty began protest¬ 
ing that the Declaration plainly gave the people the right to alter the govern¬ 
ment under which they lived and even to abolish it altogether, they encountered 
the utmost incredulity. On more than one occasion, in fact, such an exegete 
was tarred and feathered by the shocked members of the American Legion, even 
after the Declaration had been read to them. What ailed them was that they 
could not understand its eighteenth century English. It was, no doubt, to 
aid them that the Division of Citizenship Training, Department of Labor, 
issued simplified forms of the Declaration and the Constitution in 1921. These 
revised versions were made by Edgar M. Ross in cooperation with a special 
committee of the Commission of Immigration and Citizenship of Chicago. 
They are in Federal Citizenship Textbook, Part III; Washington, 1921.] 

When things get so balled up that the people of a country have got 
to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, 
without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God 
Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done 

398 


APPENDIX 


399 


it, so that everybody can see they are on the level, and not trying 
to put nothing over on nobody. 

All we got to say on this proposition is this: first, me and you 
is as good as anybody else, and maybe a damn sight better; second, 
nobody ain’t got no right to take away none of our rights; third, 
every man has got a right to live, to come and go as he pleases, 
and to have a good time whichever way he likes, so long as he don’t 
interfere with nobody else. That any government that don’t give a 
man them rights ain’t worth a damn; also, people ought to choose the 
kind of government they want themselves, and nobody else ought 
to have no say in the matter. That whenever any government don’t 
do this, then the people have got a right to can it and put in one 
that will take care of their interests. Of course, that don’t mean 
having a revolution every day like them South American coons and 
yellow-bellies and Bolsheviki, or every time some job-holder goes to 
work and does something he ain’t got no business to do. It is better 
to stand a little graft, etc., than to have revolutions all the time, like 
them coons and Bolsheviki, and any man that wasn’t a anarchist or 
one of them I. W. W.’s would say the same. But when things get so 
bad that a man ain’t hardly got no rights at all no more, but you 
might almost call him a slave, then everybody ought to get together 
and throw the grafters out, and put in new ones who won’t carry on so 
high and steal so much, and then watch them. This is the proposition 
the people of these Colonies is up against, and they have got tired of 
it, and won’t stand it no more. The administration of the present 
King, George III, has been rotten from the start, and when anybody 
kicked about it he always tried to get away with it by strong-arm 
work. Here is some of the rough stuff he has pulled: 

He vetoed bills in the Legislature that everybody was in favor 
of, and hardly nobody was against. 

He wouldn’t allow no law to be passed without it was first put 
up to him, and then he stuck it in his pocket and let on he forgot 
about it, and didn’t pay no attention to no kicks. 

When people went to work and gone to him and asked him to put 
through a law about this or that, he give them their choice: either 
they had to shut down the Legislature and let him pass it all by him¬ 
self, or they couldn’t have it at all. 


400 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


He made the Legislature meet at one-horse tank-towns out in 
the alfalfa belt, so that hardly nobody could get there and most of 
the leaders would stay home and let him go to work and do things 
like he wanted. 

He give the Legislature the air, and sent the members home every 
time they stood up to him and give him a call-down or bawled him 
out. 

When a Legislature was busted up he wouldn’t allow no new one 
to be elected, so that there wasn’t nobody left to run things, but 
anybody could walk in and do whatever they pleased. 

He tried to scare people outen moving into these States, and made 
it so hard for a wop or one of them poor kikes to get his papers 
that he would rather stay home and not try it, and then, when he 
come in, he wouldn’t let him have no land, and so he either went 
home again or never come. 

He monkeyed with the courts, and didn’t hire enough judges to 
do the work, and so a person had to wait so long for his case to 
come up that he got sick of waiting, and went home, and so never 
got what was coming to him. 

He got the judges under his thumb by turning them out when 
they done anything he didn’t like, or holding up their salaries, so 
that they had to cough up or not get no money. 

He made a lot of new jobs, and give them to loafers that nobody 
knowed nothing about, and the poor people had to pay the bill, 
whether they wanted to or not. 

Without no war going o$, he kept an army loafing around the 
country, no matter how much people kicked about it. 

He let the army run things to suit theirself and never paid no 
attention whatsoever to nobody which didn’t wear no uniform. 

He let grafters run loose, from God knows where, and give them 
the say in everything, and let them put over such things as the fol¬ 
lowing : 

Making poor people board and lodge a lot of soldiers they ain’t 
got no use for, and don’t want to see loafing around. 

When the soldiers kill a man, framing it up so that they would 
get off. 

Interfering with business. 


APPENDIX 


401 


Making us pay taxes without asking us whether we thought the 
things we had to pay taxes for was something that was worth paying 
taxes for or not. 

When a man was arrested and asked for a jury trial, not letting 
him have no jury trial. 

Chasing men out of the country, without being guilty of nothing, 
and trying them somewheres else for what they done here. 

In countries that border on us, he put in bum governments, and 
then tried to spread them out, so that by and by they would take 
in this country too, or make our own government as bum as they was. 
He never paid no attention whatever to the Constitution, but he 
went to work and repealed laws that everybody was satisfied with 
and hardly nobody was against, and tried to fix the government so 
that he could do whatever he pleased. 

He busted up the Legislatures and let on he could do all the work 
better by himself. 

Now he washes his hands of us and even goes to work and declares 
war on us, so we don’t owe him nothing, and whatever authority he 
ever had he ain’t got no more. 

He has burned down towns, shot down people like dogs, and 
raised hell against us out on the ocean. 

He hired' whole regiments of Dutch, etc., to fight us, and told 
them they could have anything they wanted if they could take it 
away from us, and sicked these Dutch, etc., on us without paying 
no attention whatever to international law. 

He grabbed our own people when he found them in ships on the 
ocean, and shoved guns into their hands, and made them fight 
against us, no matter how much they didn’t want to. 

He stirred up the Indians, and give them arms and ammunition, 
and told them to go to it, and they have killed men, women and 
children, and don’t care which. 

Every time he has went to work and pulled any of these things, 
we have went to work and put in a kick, but every time we have 
went to work and put in a kick he has went to work and did it 
again. When a man keeps on handing out such rough stuff all the 
time, all you can say is that he ain’t got no class and ain’t fitten 



402 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


to have no authority over people who have got any rights, and he 
ought to be kicked out. 

When we complained to the English we didn’t get no more satis¬ 
faction. Almost every day we give them plenty of warning that the 
politicians over there was doing things to us that they didn’t have no 
right to do. We kept on reminding them who we was, and what we 
was doing here, and how we come to come here. We asked them to 
get us a square deal, and told them that if this thing kept on we’d 
have to do something about it and maybe they wouldn’t like it. But 
the more we talked, the more they didn’t pay no attention to us. 
Therefore, if they ain’t for us they must be agin us, and we are ready 
to give them the fight of their lives, or to shake hands when it is 
over. 

Therefore be it resolved, That we, the representatives of the peo¬ 
ple of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, hereby 
declare as follows: That the United States, which was the United 
Colonies in former times, is now a free country, and ought 
to be; that we have throwed out the English King and don’t want 
to have nothing to do with him no more, and are not taking no more 
English orders no more; and that, being as we are now a free country, 
we can do anything that free countries can do, especially declare 
war, make peace, sign treaties, go into business, etc. And we swear 
on the Bible on this proposition, one and all, and agree to stick 
to it no matter what happens, whether we win or we lose, and 
whether we get away with it or get the worst of it, no matter 
whether we lose all our property by it or even get hung for it. 


2 . 

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. 

Eighty-seven years ago them old-timers that you heard about in 
school signed the Declaration of Independence, and put the kibosh 
on the English king, George III. From that day to this, this has 
been a free country. An American citizen don’t have to take offen 
his hat to nobody, excepting maybe God. He is the equal to any- 


APPENDIX 


403 


body on this earth, high or low. If anybody steps on his toes, then 
they have got a fight on their hands, and it ain’t over until the 
other fellow is licked. 

Well, now we have got a war on our hands, and them crooks from 
the South are trying to do to us what they done to the poor coons. 
The question is whether this free country is going on or whether 
they are going to put the skids under it. On this very spot where 
we stand our boys went over the top, and the enemy took to the 
woods. A great many of them give their lives in that battle. 
Everyone was a hero. Nobody hung back when the bullets began 
to fly. Well, we will take care of those who got out of it alive, 
or maybe with only a leg cut off. No American business man will 
ever turn a hero away. There will be jobs for all, and plenty of 
them. But all we can do for the dead is to put up a monument 
to them, and see that their graves are kept green. 

Well, a monument surely ain’t much. The fact is, them heroes 
don’t need no monument. Nobody will ever forget them. School- 
children will be studying about them long after all us here is 
gone. Nobody will ever ask what I said in my speech here, or 
what you said here, but everybody will want to know what our 
boys done here. The best thing we can do is to not forget what the 
battle was about that they fought in, and make up our minds to 
keep this a free country. Suppose we didn’t do it? Then what 
sense would it of been for them heroes to go over the top? Who 
could look into the eyes of their little children and say “Your 
papa died for democracy, but now it has gone blooey” ? No. This 
is the freest country in the whole world, and it is up to us to 
keep it free. Let each and everyone here today lift up their right 
hand and take an oath that they will never support no government 
withouten it is elected by the people, always remembers that who 
elected it, and never does nothing withouten it is sure the people 
want it. 


404 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


3 . 

Baseball-American 

[I am indebted to Mr. Ring W. Lardner, author of “You Know Me, Al,” for 
the following. It combines the common language with the special argot of the 
professional baseball-players, a class of men whose speech Mr. Lardner has 
studied with great diligence.] 

[Plot: The enemy has fallen on our pitcher and scored five runs. 
The side is finally retired and our men come in to the bench, where 
the manager awaits them.] 

Manager — What the hell! 1 

Pitcher ( indicating the catcher )—Ask him! 

Catcher —Ask yourself, you yella bum! {To the manager ) He’s 
been shakin’ me off all day. 

Manager —What was it Peck hit ? 

Pitcher —I was tryin’ to waste it. 

Catcher —Waste it! You dinked it up there chest high . 2 He 
couldn’t of got a better cut at it if he’d of tooken the ball in his 
hand. 

Pitcher {to the catcher )—You could of got Shawkey at the plate 
if you’d of left Jack’s peg hop. He never even hit the dirt. 

Catcher —It would of been a short hop and I couldn’t take no 
chance. You wasn’t backin’ up. You was standin’ over in back 
of third base, posin’ for a pitcher (=picture) or somethin’. 

Manager {to the catcher )—What the hell happened on that ball 
on Bodie? 

Catcher —He {referring to the pitcher ) crossed me up. I ast 
him for a hook and he yessed me and then throwed a fast one. 

Pitcher —It was a curve ball, just like you ast me, only it didn’t 
break good. 

Manager {to the pitcher )—And what about Ruth? Is that all 
the more sense you got, groovin’ one for that big ape! You’d of 
did better to roll it up there. 

Pitcher —The ball he hit was outside. 

1 Or, more likely, the Jesus! 

* Chest-high is a euphemism; the more usual form is titty-high. 


APPENDIX 


405 


Manageb —You mean after he hit it. For God’s sakes, use your 
head in there! This ain’t Fort Worth! 

Pitches —I wisht to hell it was! 

Manages —And you’re li’ble to get your wish! 

Glossary 

In there: In the pitcher’s position. 

Up there: In the batter’s position. 

Shakin’ me off: Refusing to pitch the kind of ball I signalled for. 

Waste: To pitch a ball so high or so far outside that the batsman cannot 
reach it. 

Dink: To throw a slow ball. 

Hook: A curve ball. 

Peg: A throw. 

Hop: To bound. 

Hit the dirt: To slide. 


4 . 


Vers Americain 

[The following “l^legie Americaine,” by John V. A. Weaver, of Chicago, 8 marks 
the first appearance of the American vulgate, I believe, in serious verse. It has 
been attempted often enough by comic poets, though seldom with the accuracy 
shown by Mr. Lardner’s prose. But it was Mr. Weaver who first directed atten¬ 
tion to the obvious fact that the American proletarian is not comic to himself 
but quite serious, and that he carries on his most lofty and sentimental thoughts 
in the same tongue he uses in discussing baseball.] 

I wished I’d took the ring, not the Victrola. 

You get so tired of records, hearin’ an’ hearin’ ’em, 

And when a person don’t have much to spend 
They feel they shouldn’t ought to be so wasteful. 

And then these warm nights makes it slow inside, 

And sittin’s lovely down there by the lake 
Where him and me would always use ta go. 

He thought the Vic’d make it easier 
Without him; and it did at first. I’d play 
Some jazz-band music and I’d almost feel 

8 From In American; New York, 1921. 


406 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


His arms around me, dancin’; after that 
I’d turn out all the lights, and set there quiet 
Whiles Alma Gluck was singin’ “Home, Sweet Home”, 
And almost know his hand was strokin’ my hand. 

“If I was you, I’d take the Vic,” he says, 

“It’s somethin’ you can use; you can’t a ring. 

Wisht I had ways ta make a record for you, 

So’s I could be right with you, even though 
IJncle Sam had me” . . . How I’m glad he didn’t; 

It would be lots too much like seein’ ghosts 
How that I’m sure he never won’t come back. . . . 

Oh, God! I don’t see how I ever stand it! 

He was so big and strong! He was a darb! 

The swellest dresser, with them nifty shirts 
That fold down, and them lovely nobby shoes, 

And always all his clothes would be one color, 

Like green socks with green ties, and a green hat, 

And everything. ... We never had no words 
Or hardly none. . . . 

And now to think that mouth 
I useta kiss is bitin’ into dirt, 

And through them curls I useta smooth a bullet 
Has went. . . . 

I wisht it would of killed me, too. . . . 

Oh, well . . . about the Vic. ... I guess I’ll sell it 
And get a small ring anyways. (I won’t 
Get but half as good a one as if 
He spent it all on that when he first ast me.) 

It don’t seem right to play jazz tunes no more 
With him gone. And it ain’t a likely chanst 
I’d find nobody ever else again 
Would suit me, or I’d suit. And so a little 


APPENDIX 


407 


Quarter of a carat, maybe, but a real one 
That could sparkle, sometimes, and remember 
The home I should of had. . . . 

And still, you know, 

The Vic was his idear, and so . . . 

I wonder. . . . 


II. 

Non-English Dialects in America 

1 . 

German 

The German dialect spoken by the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch 
of lower Pennsylvania is the oldest immigrant language to remain 
in daily use in the United States, and so it shows very extensive* 
English influences. The fact that it survives at all is due to the 
extreme clannishness of the people using it—a clannishness chiefly 
based upon religious separatism. The first Germans came to Penn¬ 
sylvania toward the end of the seventeenth century and settled in 
the lower tier of counties, running from Philadelphia westward to 
the mountains; a few continued into Maryland and then down the 
Valley of Virginia. They came, in the main, from the Palatinate; 
the minority hailed from Wiirttemberg, Bavaria, the lower Rhine, 
Alsace, Saxony and German Switzerland. The language they 
brought with them was thus High German; it came to be called 
Dutch by the American colonists of the time because the immi¬ 
grants themselves called it Deitsch (= Deutsch ), and because Dutch 
was then (and has remained, to some extent, ever since) a generic 
American term to designate all the Germanic peoples and languages. 
This misuse of Dutch is frequently ascribed to the fact that the 
colonists were very familiar with the true Dutch in New York, but 
as a matter of fact Dutch was commonly used in place of German 



408 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


by the English of the seventeenth century and the colonists simply 
brought the term with them and preserved it as they preserved many 
other English archaisms. The Pennsylvania Germans themselves 
often used Pennsylvania Dutch in place of Pennsylvania German. 

Their dialect has produced an extensive literature and has been 
studied and described at length by competent philologians; in conse¬ 
quence there is no need to deal with it here at any length. 4 Excel¬ 
lent specimens of it are to be found in “Harbaugh’s Harfe: Gedichte 
in Pennsylvanisch-Deutscher Mundart.” 5 That part of it which 
remains genuinely German shows a change of a to o, as in jor for 
jahr; of the diphthong d to a long e, as in bees for hose, and of the 
diphthongs ei and du to the neutral e, as in hem for baume. Most 
of the German compound consonants are changed to simple con¬ 
sonants, and there is a general decay of inflections. But the chief 
mark of the dialect is its very extensive adoption of English loan 
words. Harbaugh, in his vocabulary, lists some characteristic ex¬ 
amples, e. g., affis from office, altfaschen from old-fashioned, beseid 
from beside, boghie from buggy, bortsch from porch, diehlings from 
dealings, Dschdck from Jack, dscheneral-leckschen from general- 
election, dschont’lleit (= gentle lent) from gentlemen, Dschim from 
Jim, dschuryman from juryman, ebaut from about, ennihau from 
anyhow, gehm from game, kunschtabler from constable, lofletters 
from love-letters, tornpeik from turnpike and ’xdktly from exactly. 
Many English words have been taken in and inflected in the German 
manner, e.g., gedscheest (= ge -j- chased ), gedschumpt (ge + 
jumped ) and gepliescht (= ge + pleased). The vulgar American 
pronunciation often shows itself, as in heist for hoist and krick for 
creek. An illuminating brief specimen of the language is to be 
found in the sub-title of E. H. Bauch’s “Pennsylvania Dutch Hand¬ 
book” : 6 “En booch for inschtructa.” Here we see the German in¬ 
definite article decayed to en, the spelling of buch made to conform 
to English usage, fur abandoned for for, and a purely English word, 
instruction, boldly adopted and naturalized. Some astounding ex- 

4 See the Bibliography, p. 447, and especially the works of Haldeman, Horne, 
Learned, Lins, Miller and Rauch. 

5 Philadelphia, 1874; rev. ed., 1902. 

6 Mauch Chunk, Pa., 1879. 



APPENDIX 


409 


amples of Pennsylvania German are to be found in the copious 
humorous literature of the dialect; e.g., “Mein stallion hat liber die 
fenz geschumpt and dem nachbar sein whiet abscheulich gedd- 
matscht (My stallion jumped over the fence, and horribly dam¬ 
aged my neighbor’s wheat.) Such phrases as “Es giebt gar kein 
use” and “Ich kann es nicht standen” are very common on Penn¬ 
sylvania German lips. Of late, with the improvement in communi¬ 
cations, the dialect shows signs of disappearing. The younger Penn¬ 
sylvania Germans learn English in school, read English newspapers, 
and soon forget their native patois. But so recently as the eighties 
of the last century, two hundred years after the coming of the 
first German settlers, there were thousands of their descendants in 
Pennsylvania who could scarcely speak English at all. 

An interesting variant dialect is to be found in the Valley of 
Virginia, though it is fast dying out. It is an offshoot of Pennsyl¬ 
vania German, and shows even greater philological decay. The 
genitive ending has been dropped and possession is expressed by 
various syntactical devices, e.g., der mann set buck, dem mann sei 
buck or am mann sei buck. The cases of the nouns do not vary in 
form, adjectives are seldom inflected, and only two tenses of the 
verbs remain, the present and the perfect, e.g., ich gek and ich bin 
gauge. The indefinite article, en in Pennsylvania German, has been 
worn away to a simple ’n. The definite article has been preserved, 
but das has changed to des. It is declined as follows: 


Nom. 

der 

die 

des-’s 

die 

Dat. 

dem-’m 

der 

dem-’m 

dene 

Aoc. 

den-der 

die 

des-’s 

die 


In brief, this Valley German is a language in the last stages of 
decay. The only persons speaking it are a few remote country¬ 
folk and they have reduced it to its elements: even the use of polite 
pronouns, preserved in Pennsylvania German and so important in 
true German, has been abandoned. It has been competently in¬ 
vestigated and described by H. M. Hays, 7 from whom I borrow 
the following specimen of it: 

T On the German Dialect Spoken in the Valley of Virginia, Dialect Notes, 
vol. iii, p. 263. 



410 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


’S war wimol ei Matel, wu ihr Liebling fat in der Grieg ia, un’ is dot gmacht 
wure. Sie hut aich so arg gedrauert un’ hut ksat: “0 wann ieh ihn just noch 
eimol sehne konnt!” Ei Ovet is sie an ’n Partie gange, aver es war ken Freud 
dat fur sie. Sie hut gwiinscht, ihre Lieve war dat au. Wie freundlich sie sei 
hatt konne! Sie is ’naus in den Garde gange, un’ war allei im Monlicht khockt. 
Kschwind hut sie ’n Reiter hore komme. ’S war ihre Lieve ufm weisse Gaul. 
Er hut ken Wat ksat, aver hut sie uf den Gaul hinner sich gno m me, un’ ia 
fatgritte. . . . 


The German spoken elsewhere in the United States is much less 
decayed. The hard effort of German schoolmasters and the exten¬ 
sive literature that it has produced 8 tend to keep it relatively pure, 
even from English influences. But a great many loan-words have 
nevertheless got into it, and it shows some phenomena that instantly 
arrest the attention of a German arriving from Germany, for exam¬ 
ple, the use of gleiche for to like, by false analogy from gleich 
( =like, similar), and the appearance of such forms as ausgespielt 9 
(by imitation from the American-English played out). The Ger¬ 
man encountered in German newspapers printed in the United 
States is often very bad, but this is simply due to the fact that much 
of it is written by uneducated men. Nothing approaching a gen¬ 
eral decay is visible in it; in intent, at least, it is always good High 
German. 


2 . 


French 


The French spoken in Canada has been so extensively studied and 
literature is so accessible that it is scarcely necessary to describe it 
at any length. A very extensive investigation of it was undertaken 
by the late Dr. A. M. Elliott, of the Johns Hopkins University; 
his conclusions may be found in the American Joumal of Philology . 10 
Since then researches into its history, phonology and morphology 

8 Cf. Non-English Writings: I, German, by A. B. Faust, in the Cambridge 
History of American Literature, vol. iv, p. 572 ff. There is a valuable bibliography 
appended, p. 813 ff. 

9 This word has gone into American. 

10 Vol. vi, p. 135; vol. vii, p. 141; vol. vii, p. 135 and p. 338; vol. x, p. 133. 


APPENDIX 


411 


have been made by James Geddes, Jr., 11 A. F. Chamberlain 12 
and other competent philologists, and there has grown up an exten¬ 
sive literature by native, French-speaking Canadians. 13 Dr. Elliott 
says that alarmed purists predicted so long ago as 1817 that the 
French of Canada would be completely obliterated by English, and 
this fear still shows itself in all discussions of the subject by French- 
Canadians. But the language continues as the daily speech of per¬ 
haps 1,500,000 persons, and still has an official status, and is often 
heard in the Dominion Parliament. “The effect of English on the 
French,” says Elliott, “has been immeasurably greater than that of 
French on the English. . . . The French has made use of all the 
productive means—suffixes, prefixes—at its disposal to incorporate 
the English vocables in its word-supply, . . . and to adapt them by 
a skilful use of its inflectional apparatus to all the requirements of 
a rigid grammatical system.” On one page of N\ E. Dionne’s lexi¬ 
con I find the following loan-words from English: barkeeper, bar- 
gaine (used in place of marche), bar-room, bull’s-eye, buckwheat, 
buggy, buck-board, bugle, bully, bum, business, bus. As will be 
observed, a large proportion of them are not really English at all, 
but American. Many other Americanisms have got into the lan¬ 
guage, e. g., gang (in the political sense), greenback, ice-cream, ele- 
vateur, knickerbockers, trolley-car, sweater, swell (as an adjective of 
all work), caucus, lofeur {= loafer, a loan-word originally German) 
and lager, another. “Comme tu es swell ce matin, vas-tu aux noces ?” 
—this is now excellent Canadian French. So is gologne ( = go 
’long). Louvigny de Montigny, in “La Langue Frangaise au 
Canada,” complains bitterly that American words and phrases are 
relentlessly driving out French words and phrases, even when the 
latter are quite as clear and convenient. Thus, un patron, through¬ 
out French Canada, is now un boss, petrole is I’huile de charbon 

11 Mr. Geddes’ studies have been chiefly published in Germany. His Study of 
an Acadian-French Dialect Spoken on the North Shore of the Baie-des-Chaleurs; 
Halle, 1908, contains an exhaustive bibliography. 

11 He printed an article on Dialect Research in Canada in Dialect Notes, vol. i, 
p. 43. A bibliography is added. 

3 For example: La Langue Frangaise au Canada, by Louvigny de Montigny; 
Ottawa, 1916, and Le Parler Populaire des Canadiens Frangais; by N. E. 
Dionne; Quebec, 1909. The latter is a lexicon running to 671 pages. 




412 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


(= coal-oil), une bonne a tout faire is une servante generate , and 
un article d’occasion is un article de seconde main! 

The French dialect spoken by the Creoles and their colored re¬ 
tainers in Louisiana has been extensively studied, 14 as has the dialect 
of the French West Indies. Its principal characters must be familiar 
to every reader of the stories of Lafcadio Hearn, George W. Cable, 
Kate Chopin and Grace Elizabeth King. It produced a large oral 
literature, chiefly in the form of songs, during the days of actual 
French rule in Louisiana, and some of this literature is still pre¬ 
served, though the French-speaking population of the state is rapidly 
diminishing, and Hew Orleans is now a thoroughly American city. 
But the written literature of the Creoles was almost wholly in stand¬ 
ard French. Curiously enough, nearly all of it was produced, 
not during the clays of French rule, but after the American 
occupation in 1803. “It was not until after the War of 1812,” 
says a recent historian of it, 15 “that letters really flourished in French 
Louisiana. The contentment and prosperity that filled the forty 
years between 1820 and 1860 encouraged the growth of a vigorous 
and in some respects a native literature, comprising plays, novels, 
and poems.” The chief dramatists of the period were Placide 
Canonge, A. Lussan, Oscar Dugue, Le Blanc de Villeneufve, P. 
Perennes and Charles Testut; today all their works are dead, and 
they themselves are but names. Testut was also a poet and novelist; 
other novelists were Canonge, Alfred Mercier, Alexandre Barde, 
Adrien Rouquette, Jacques de Roquigny and Charles Lemaitre. The 
principal poets were Dominique Rouquette, Tullius Saint-Ceran, 
Constant Lepouze, Felix de Courmont, Alexandre Latil, A. Lussan, 
and Armand Lanusse. But the most competent of all the Creole 
authors was Charles E. A. Gayerre (1805-95), who was at once 
historian, dramatist and novelist. Today the Creole literature is 

14 For example, by J. A. Harrison, in The Creole Patois of Louisiana, American 
Journal of Philology, vol. iii, p. 285 ff.; by Alcee Fortier, in The French Lan¬ 
guage in Louisiana and the Negro French Dialect; New Orleans, n. d.; Acadians 
of Louisiana and Their Dialect; New Orleans, 1891, and A Few Words About 
the Creoles of Louisiana; Baton Rouge, 1892; and by H. Schuchardt, in Beitriige 
zur Kenntniss des Englischen Kreolisch, Englische Studien, vol. xii, p. 470; 
vol. xiii, p. 158, and vol. xv, p. 286. 

15 Edward J. Fortier, in the Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 
iv, p. 591. A bibliography is appended, p. 820 ff. 


APPENDIX 


413 


practically extinct. A few poets and essayists are still at work, but 
they are of no importance. 


8 . 

Spanish 

The mutations of Spanish in Spanish-America have been very 
extensively studied by Spanish-American philologists, and there are 
separate monographs on Cubanisms, Mexicanisms, Porto Ricanisms, 
Venezuelanisms, Argentinisms, Peruanisms, Chileanisms, Costa 
Ricanisms and Honduranisms, and even extensive discussions 
of the dialects of single cities, notably Buenos Ayres and the 
City of Mexico. 16 The influence of the Indian language has been 
especially studied. 17 But the only extensive treatise upon the 
Spanish spoken in the United States is a series of four papers by 
Dr. Aurelio M. Espinosa, of Leland Stanford, Jr., University, in 
the Revue de Dialectologie Romano under the general title of 
“Studies in New Mexican Spanish.” 18 These papers, however, are 
of such excellence that they almost exhaust the subject. The first 
two deal with the phonology of the dialect and the last two with its 
morphology. Dr. Espinosa, who was a professor in the University 
of New Mexico for eight years, reports that the Spanish of the 
Southwest, in its general characters, shows a curious parallel with 
American English. There is the same decay of grammatical niceties 
—the conjugations of the verb, for example, are reduced to two—the 
same great hospitality to loan-words, the same leaning toward a 
picturesque vividness, and the same preservation of words and 
phrases that have become archaic in the standard language. “It is 
a source of delight to the student of Spanish philology,” he says, 
“to hear daily from the mouths of New Mexicans such words as 
agora, ansi, naidien, trujo, escrebir, adrede ”—all archaic Castilian 

16 See the Bibliography—Non-English Languages in America: Spanish—under 
Abeille, Arons, Ferraz, Maspero, Armengal y Valenzuela, Malaret, Calanno, 
Pichardo, Rincdn, Ramos y Duarte, Sanchez, Sanz and Toro y Gisbert. 

1T See Ferraz, Armengal y Valenzuela, Robelo, Sanchez and Espinosa in the 
Bibliography. 

«Tome i, p. 157 and p. 269; tome iii, p. 251; tome iv, p. 241, 


414 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


forms, and corresponding exactly to the fox-fire, homespun, andiron, 
ragamuffin, fall (for autumn), flapjack and cesspool that are pre¬ 
served in American. They are survivors, in the main, of the Castilian 
Spanish of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, though some of them 
come from other Spanish dialects. Castilian has changed very much 
since that time, as standard English has changed; it is probable, 
indeed, that a Castilian of the year 1525, coming back to life today, 
would understand a New Mexican far more readily than he would 
understand a Spaniard, just as an Englishman of 1630 would under¬ 
stand a Kentucky mountaineer more readily than he would under¬ 
stand a Londoner. 

New Mexico has been in the possession of the United States since 
1846, and so it is natural to find its Spanish corrupted by American 
influences, especially in the vocabulary. Of the 1,400 words that 
Dr. Espinosa chooses for remark, 300 are English, 75 are Nahuatl, 
10 come from the Indian languages of the Southwest, and 15 are 
of doubtful or unknown origin; the rest are pure Spanish, chiefly 
archaic. As in the case of the Pennsylvania Germans, the French 
Canadians and the Scandinavians of the Northwest, the Spanish¬ 
speaking people of New Mexico have borrowed the American names 
of all objects of peculiarly American character, e. g., hesbol 
{= baseball), grimbaque {—greenback), aiscrim {= ice-cream), 
quiande (= candy), fayaman {= fireman), otemil (= oatmeal), 
piquenic { — picnic), lonchi (= lunch). Most of them have been 
modified to bring them into accord with Spanish speech-habits. For 
example, all explosive endings are toned down by suffixes, e. g., lonchi 
for lunch. So with many r-endings, e. g., blofero for bluffer. And 
sibilants at the beginning of words are shaded by prefixes, e. g., 
esteque for steak and espechi for speech. Not only words have been 
taken in, but also many phrases, though most of the latter are con¬ 
verted into simple words, e. g., olraite {—all right), jaitun 
{— hightoned), jamachi {— how much), sarape {= shut up), 
enejau (= anyhow). Dr. Espinosa’s study is a model of what such 
an inquiry should be. I cordially commend it to all students of dialect. 

English has also greatly influenced the Spanish spoken in Spanish- 
America proper, especially in Mexico, Cuba, Porto Pico and in the 
seaports of South America. Sandwich and club, though they are 


APPENDIX 


415 


not used by the Spaniards, are quite good Mexican. Bluffer is quite 
as familiar in Cuban Spanish as it is in New Mexican Spanish, 
though in Cuba it has become blofista instead of blofero. I take the 
following from El Mundo, one of the Havana newspapers, of June 
28, 1920: 

New York, junio 27.—Por un sensacional "batting rally, en el octavo inning 
en el que los Yankees dieron seis hits incluyendo un triple de Ruth y tubeyes de 
Ward y Meusel, gano el New York el match de esta tarde, pues hizo cinco Ca¬ 
rreras en ese episodio, venciendo 7 a 5. Mays el pitcher de los locales autuo bien, 
con excepcion del cuarto round, cuando Vitt le did un home run con dos en bases. 

Nor are such words any longer exotic; the Cubans have adopted 
the terminology with the game, and begin to use it figuratively as 
the Americans use it. Along the east coast of South America the 
everyday speech of the people is full of Americanisms, and they 
enter very largely into the fashionable slang of the upper classes. 
Cocktail, dinner-dance, one-step, fox-trot, sweater, kimono, high-ball, 
ginger-ale and sundae are in constant use, and most of them are 
pronounced correctly, though sundae is transformed into soondde. 
Bombo {= boom ) is used by all the politicians, and so are plata- 
forma (= platform ), mitin (=meeting ), alarmista, big-stick, 
damphool and various forms of to bluff. The American auto has 
been naturalized, and so has ice-cream, but in the form of milk- 
cream, pronounced milclee by the lower orders. The boss of a train 
down there is the conductor del tren; a commuter is a commutador; 
switch is used both in its American railroad sense and to indicate 
the electrical device; slip, dock and wharf (the last pronounced 
gudfay) are in daily use; so is socket (electrical), though it is pro¬ 
nounced sokaytay; so are poker and many of the terms appertaining 
to the game. The South Americans use just in the American way, 
as in justamente a (or en) tiempo {—just in time). They are 
very fond of good-bye and go to hell. They have translated the verb 
phrase, to water stocks, into aguar las acciones. The American white 
elephant has become el elefanto bianco. In Cuba the watermelon — 
patilla or sandia, in Spanish—is the melon-de-agua. Just as French- 
Canadian has borrowed Americanisms that are loan-words from other 
immigrant tongues, e. g., bum and loafer from the German, so some 
of the South American dialects have borrowed rapidas (= rapids ), 


416 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


and kimono, the first brought into American from the French and 
the second from the Japanese. 19 


4. 

Yiddish 

Yiddish, even more than American, is a lady of easy virtue among 
the languages. Basically, a medieval High German, it has become 
so overladen with Hebrew, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian and even 
Hungarian words that it is unintelligible to Germans. 20 Trans¬ 
ported to the United States, it has taken in so many English words 
and phrases, and particularly so many Americanisms, that it is now 
nearly unintelligible, as spoken in the big cities of the East, to recent 
arrivals from Russia and Poland. Such typical Americanisms as 
sky-scraper, loan-shark, graft, bluffer, faker, boodler, gangster, crook, 
guy, kike, piker, squealer, bum, cadet, boom, bunch, pants, vest, 
loafer, jumper, stoop, saleslady, ice-box, and raise are quite as good 
Yiddish as they are American. For all the objects and acts of 
everyday life the East Side Jews commonly use English terms, 
e. g., boy, chair, window, carpet, floor, dress, hat, watch, ceiling, 
consumption, property, trouble, bother, match, change, party, birth¬ 
day, picture, paper (only in the sense of newspaper ), gambler, show, 
hall, kitchen, store, bedroom, key, mantelpiece, closet, lounge, broom, 
table-cloth, paint, landlord, fellow, tenant, bargain, sale, haircut, 
razor, basket, school, scholar, teacher, baby, mustache, butcher, 
grocery, dinner, street and walk. In the factories there is the same 
universal use of shop, wages, foreman, boss, sleeve, collar, cuff, but¬ 
ton, cotton, thimble, needle, machine, pocket, remnant, piece-work, 
sample, etc., even by recent immigrants. Many of these words have 
quite crowded out the corresponding Yiddish terms, so that the latter 

19 For most of these observations I am indebted to Dr. A. Z. Ldpez-Penha, the 
distinguished Colombian poet and critic. 

29 During the war I visited Lithuania and Livonia while they were occupied 
by the Germans. The latter could not understand the Yiddish of the native 
Jews, but there were in almost every town a few Jews who had been to 
the United States and could speak English, and these were employed as inter¬ 
preters. Among the Germans, of course, there were many English-speaking 
officers. 


APPENDIX 


417 


are seldom heard. For example, ingle, meaning boy (=Ger. jting¬ 
ling), has been wholly obliterated by the English word. A Jewish 
immigrant almost invariably refers to his son as his boy, though 
strangely enough he calls his daughter his meidel. “Die boys mit 
die meidlach haben a good time” is excellent American Yiddish. In 
the same way fenster has been completely displaced by window, 
though tiir (= door) has been left intact. Tisch (= table) also 
remains, but chair is always used, probably because few of the Jews 
had chairs in the old country. There the beinJcel, a bench without a 
back, was in use; chairs were only for the well-to-do. Floor has 
apparently prevailed because no invariable corresponding word was 
employed at home: in various parts of Russia and Poland a floor is 
a dill, a podloge, or a bricke. So with ceiling. There were six differ¬ 
ent words for it. 

Yiddish inflections have been fastened upon most of these loan¬ 
words. Thus, “er hat ihm abgefalced” is “he cheated him,” zubumt 
is the American gone to the bad, fix’n is to fix, usen is to use, and 
so on. The feminine and diminutive suffix -he is often added to 
nouns. Thus bluffer gives rise to bluff erke (= hypocrite ), and one 
also notes dresske, hatke, watchke and bummerke. “Oi! is sie a 
bluff erke!” is good American Yiddish for “isn’t she a hypocrite!” 
The suffix -nick, signifying agency, is also freely applied. Allright- 
nick means an upstart, an offensive boaster, one of whom his fellows 
would say “He is all right” with a sneer. Similarly, consumptionick 
means a victim of tuberculosis. Other suffixes are -chick and -ige, 
the first exemplified in boychick, a diminutive of boy, and the second 
in next-doorige, meaning the woman next-door, an important person 
in ghetto social life. Some of the loan-words, of course, undergo 
changes on Yiddish-speaking lips. Thus landlord becomes lendler, 
certificate (a pretty case of Hobson-Jobson!) becomes stiff-ticket, 
lounge becomes lunch, tenant becomes tenner, and whiskers loses its 
final s. “Wie gefallt dir sein whisker?” (= how do you like his 
beard?) is good Yiddish, ironically intended. Fellow, of course, 
changes to the American fella or feller, as in “Rosie hat schon a 
fella” (= Rosie has got a fella, i. e., a sweetheart). Show, in the 
sense of chance, is used constantly, as in “git ihm a show” {— give 
him a chance ). Bad boy is adopted bodily, as in “er is a bad boy” 


418 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


To shut up is inflected as one word, as in “er hat nit gewolt shutup’n” 
(—he wouldn’t shut up). To catch is used in the sense of to obtain, 
as in “catch’n a gmilath chesed” ( = to raise a loan). Here, by the 
way, gmilath chesed is excellent Biblical Hebrew. To bluff, un¬ 
changed in form, takes on the new meaning of to lie: a bluffer is a 
liar. Scores of American phrases are in constant use, among them, 
all right, never mind, I bet you, no sir and TU fix you. It is curious 
to note that sure Mike, borrowed by the American vulgate from Irish 
English, has gone over into American Yiddish. Finally, to make 
an end, here are two complete American Yiddish sentences: 
“Sie wet clean’n die rooms, scrub’n dem floor, wash’n die windows, 
dress’n dem boy und gehn in butcher-store und in grocery. Dernoch 
vet sie machen dinner und gehn in street fur a walk/’ 21 

For some time past there has been an active movement among the 
Hew York Jews for the purification of Yiddish. This movement is an 
offshoot of Zionism, and has resulted in the establishment of a num¬ 
ber of Yiddish schools. Its adherents do not propose, of course, 
that English be abandoned, but simply that the two languages be kept 
separate, and that Jewish children be taught Yiddish as well as 
English. The Yiddishists insist that it is more dignified to say 
a gooten tog than good-bye, and billet instead of ticket. But the 
movement makes very poor progress. “The Americanisms absorbed 
by the Yiddish of this country,” says Abraham Cahan, “have come 
to stay. To hear one say ‘Ich hob a billet fur heitige vorschtellung’ 
would be as jarring to the average East Side woman, no matter how 
illiterate and ignorant she might be, as the intrusion of a bit of 
Chinese in her daily speech.” 

Yiddish, as everyone knows, has produced a very extensive litera¬ 
ture during the past two generations; it is, indeed, so large and so 
important that I can do no more than refer to it here. 22 Much of 
it has come from Jewish authors living in Hew York. In their work, 
and particularly their work for the stage, there is extensive and 

31 1 am indebted throughout this section to Mr. Abraham Cahan, editor of the 
leading Yiddish daily in New York, and a distinguished writer in both Yiddish 
and English. 

22 Cf. the article on Yiddish, by Nathaniel Buchwald, in the Cambridge History 
of American Literature, vol. iv, p. 598, and the bibliography following, p. 822 ff. 


APPENDIX 


419 


brilliant evidence of the extent to which American English has influ¬ 
enced the language. 


5 . 

Italian 

Remy de Gourmont, the French critic, was the first to call atten¬ 
tion to the picturesqueness of the Americanized Italian spoken by 
Italians in the United States; 23 unluckily his appreciation of its 
qualities has not been shared by American Romance scholars. 
The literature dealing with it, in fact, is confined to one capital study 
by Dr. Arthur Livingston, 24 formerly of Columbia University, who 
says that other “American philologists have curiously disdained it.” 
Meanwhile, it has begun to produce, like Yiddish, an extensive litera¬ 
ture, ranging in character and quality from such eloquent pieces as 
Giovanni Pascoli’s “Italy” to the Rabelaisian trifles of Carlo Ferraz- 
zano. Ferrazzano shines in the composition of macchiette coloniali 
for the cheap Italian theatres in Hew York. The macchietta 
coloniale is an Americanized variety of the Neapolitan macchietta, 
which Dr. Livingston describes as “a character-sketch—etymologi¬ 
cally, a character-‘daub’—most often constructed on rigorous canons 
of ‘ingenuity’: there must be a literal meaning, accompanied by a 
double sense, which in the nature of the tradition, inclines to be 
pornographic.” The macchietta was brought to Hew York by 
Edoardo Migliacci (Farfariello), purged of its purely Neapolitan 
materials, and so adapted to the comprehension of Italians from other 
parts of Italy. Farfariello wrote fully five hundred macchiette and 
Ferrazzano has probably written as many more; many of the latter 
have been printed. They are commonly in verse, with now and then 
a descent to prose. I take from Dr. Livingston’s study a specimen 
of the latter: 

Ne sera dentro na barra americana dove il patrone era americano, lo vi&co 
era americano, la birra era americana, ce steva na ghenga de loffari tutti ameri- 
cani: solo io non ero americano; quanno a tutto nu mumento me mettono 
mmezzo e me dicettono: Aid spaghetti; iu mericano menf No! no! mi Italy 

“In L’Esthetique de la Langue Francaise; Paris, 1899. 

** La Merica Sanemagogna, Romanic Review, vol. ix, no. 2, p. 206 ff. 



420 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


men! Iu blacco enze. No, no! Iu laico chistu contri. No, no! Mi lalco mio 
oontry! Mi laico Italy! A questa punto me chiavaieno lo primo fait! “Dice: 
Orre for America!” Io tuosto: Orre for Italy! Un ato fait. “Dice: Orr6 for 
America!” Orr6 for Italy! N’ato fait e n ato fait, fino a che me facetteno 
addurmentare; ma per6, orr& for America nun o dicette! 

Quanno me scietaie, me trovaie ncoppa lu marciepiedi cu nu pulizio vicino che 
diceva; Ghvroppe bomma! Io ancora stunato alluccaie: America nun guddel 
Orr6 for Italy! Sapete li pulizio che facette? Mi arresto! 

Quanno fu la mattina, lu giorge mi dicette: Wazzo maro laste nwitet Io 
risponette: No tocche nglese! “No? Tenne dollari.” E quello porco dello 
giorge nun scherzava, perche le diece pezze se le pigliaie! . . . 

Most of the Americanisms are obvious: barra for bar, visco for 
whisky, blacco enze for black-hand, laico for like, chistu for this, 
contri for country, fait for fight (it is also used for punch, as in 
chiaver nu fair, give a punch, and nato fait, another punch), loffari 
for loafers, ghiroppe for get up, bomma for bum, pulizio for police, 
nun gudde for no good, orre for hurray, giorge for judge, wazzo maro 
for what’s the matter, taste for last, naite for night, to echo for talk, 
tenne for ten, dollari for dollars. All of the macchiette coloniali 
are gaudy with the same sort of loan-words; one of the best of them, 
says Dr. Livingston, is Farfariello’s “A lingua ’nglese,” which is 
devoted almost wholly to humorous attempts to represent English 
words as ignorant Italians hear and use them. 

As in the case of Yiddish, there is a movement among Italian 
intellectuals in America, and especially in New York, for the res¬ 
toration of a purer Italian. These purists are careful to use the 
sotterraneo to take them nell bassa citta. But the great majority 
prefer il subway or the tonno (= tunnel) to take them tantane 
(= downtown). All the common objects of life tend similarly to 
acquire names borrowed from American English, sometimes bodily 
and sometimes by translation. In the main, these loan-words are 
given Italianized forms and inflected in a more or less correct Italian 
manner. Dr. Livingston presents a number of interesting examples 
from the advertising columns of an Italian newspaper in New York. 
Pressers are pressatori, operators are operatori, machines are 
mascine, carpenters are carpentieri, pressers helpers are sottopress- 
atori, a store is a storo, board is bordo, boarders are dbbordato, 
bushelmen are buscellatori, customs-coats are cotti da costume, mens 


APPENDIX 


421 


coats are cotti da uomo. “Originally,” lie says, “the policy of this 
paper was to translate, in correct form, the Italian copy. The prac¬ 
tice had to be abandoned because poorer results were obtained from 
advertisements restored to the literary tongue.” In other words, the 
average Italian in New York now understands American-Italian 
better than he understands the standard language of his country. 

The newly arrived Italian quickly picks up the Americanized 
vocabulary. Almost at once he calls the man in charge of his ghenga 
( = gang) his bosso, and talks of his work in the indiccio ( = ditch) 
and with the sciabola ( = shovel), picco ( = pick) and stim-scidbola 
(— steam-shovel) . He buys sechenze (= second-hand) clothes, 
works on the tracca (= track), buys food at the grosseria (= gro¬ 
cery) or marchetto (= market), eats pinozze (= peanuts), rides on 
the livetta {— elevated), rushes a grotto (= growler) for near-beer, 
gets on good terms with the barritenne (= bartender), and speaks of 
the auschieppe (= housekeeper) of his boarding-house, denounces 
idlers as loffari (= loafers), joins a globbo (= club), gets himself 
a ghella (= girl ), and is her falo (= fellow). Some of the new 
words he acquires are extremely curious, e. g., canabvldogga (= bull¬ 
dog), pipe del gasso ( = gas-pipe), coppetane (= ’ncuop -f- town = 
uptown), fruttistenne (= fruit-stand), sanemagogna ( = son-of-a- 
gun), mezzo-barrista (= half-time bartender) . Several quite new 
words, unknown to Americans, have been made of American mate¬ 
rials and added to the vocabulary. An example is afforded by 
temeniollo, signifying a very large glass of beer. Dr. Livingston 
says that it comes from Tammany Hall! Another Italian-American 
invention is flabussce, used as an interjection to indicate the extreme 
of pessimism. It comes from Flatbush, where the principal Italian 
cemetery is situated. 

The large emigration of Italians during the past half dozen years 
has transported a number of Americanisms to Italy. Bomma ( = 
bum) is now a familiar word in Naples^ a strange wandering, in¬ 
deed, for the original bum was German. So is schidii (= skiddoo). 
So is briccoliere (= bricklayer). 25 

28 In addition to my indebtedness to Dr. Livingston, I owe thanks for assist¬ 
ance to Prof. A. Arbib Costa, of the College of the City of New York, and to 
Mr. Alfred Boni, editor of II Progresso Italo-Americano. 



422 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


6 . 


Dano-N orwegian 

Here are some characteristic specimens of the Dano-Norwegian 
spoken by Norwegian settlers in Minnesota, as given by Dr. Nils 
Elaten, of Northfield, Minn.: 26 

Mrs. Olsen va aafel bisi idag; hun maatte bbke k£k. (Mrs. Olsen was awfully 
busy today; sbe had to bake cake.) 

Den spattute stiren braekka sig ut av pastre aa ronna langt ind i fila aa je va 
ikke aebel te aa kaetsohe’nj men saa sigga je dog gen min paa’n. (The spotted 
steer broke out of the pasture and ran far into the field before I was able to 
catch him; but then I sicked my dog at him.) 

Reileaaden ha muva schappa sine. (The railroad has moved its shops.) 

Je kunde ikke faa resa 6aa mye kaes at je fik betalt morgesen i farmen min. 
(I couldn’t raise enough cash to pay the mortgage on my farm.) 

Det meka ingen difrens. (That makes no difference.) 

Det kotta ingen figger. (That cuts no figure.) 

Hos’n fila du? Puddi gud. (How do you feel? Pretty good.) 

The words in italics would be unintelligible to a recent arrival 
from Norway; they are all American loan-words. “Such words,” 
says Dr. Flaten, “are often mutilated beyond recognition by an 
American. ... In the case of many words the younger generation 
cannot tell whether they are English or Norse. I was ten years old 
before I found that such words as paatikkel (= particular ), 
staebel ( = stable), fens ( = fence) were not Norse, but mutilated 
English. I had often wondered that poleit, trubbel, soppereter were 
so much like the English words polite , trouble , separator. So com¬ 
mon is this practise of borrowing that no English word is refused 
admittance into this vocabulary provided it can stand the treatment 
it is apt to get. Some words, indeed, are used without any appre¬ 
ciable difference in pronunciation, but more generally the root, or 
stem, is taken and Norse inflections are added as required by the 
rules of the language.” Sometimes the English loan-word and a 
corresponding Norwegian word exist side by side, but in such cases, 

“Notes on American-Norwegian, with a Vocabulary, Dialect Notes, vol. ii, 
p. 115 ff. 


APPENDIX 


423 


according to Dr. George T. Flom, 27 “there is a prevalent and grow¬ 
ing tendency” to drop the latter, save in the event that it acquires 
a special meaning. “Very often in such cases,” continues Dr. Flom, 
“the English word is shorter and easier to pronounce or the Norse 
equivalent is a purely literary word—that is, does not actually exist 
in the dialect of the settlers. ... In the considerable number of 
cases where the loan-word has an exact equivalent in the Norse dia¬ 
lect it is often very difficult to determine the reason for the loan, 
though it would be safe to say that it is frequently due simply to a 
desire on the part of the speaker to use English words, a thing that 
becomes very pronounced in the jargon that is sometimes heard.” 

Dr. Flaten exhibits the following declension of a typical loan¬ 
word, swindler. In Dano-Norwegian there is no letter w, and the 
suffix of agency is not -er but - ar; so the word becomes svindlar. 
It is regarded as masculine and declined thus: 

Singular 

Indefinite Definite 


Nom. 

ein svindlar 

svindlarn 

Gen. 

aat svindlar 

aat svindlare 

Dat. 

(te) ein svindlar 

(te) svindlar6 

Acc. 

ein svindlar 

svindlarn 


Plural 


Nom. 

noko svindlara 

svindlaradn 

Gen. 

aat noko svindlara 

aat svindlaro 

Dat. 

(te) noko svindlara 

(te) svindlaro 

A co. 

noko svindlara 

svindlaradn 


The vocabularies of Drs. Flaten and Flom show a large number 
of such substitutions of English (including some thoroughly 
American) words. The Dano-Norwegian fll is abandoned for the 
English beer, which becomes bir. Tonde succumbs to baerel, barel 
or baril { = barrel), frokost to brekkfaest {= breakfast), forsikring 
to inschurings (= insurance ), 28 staid to staebel (— stable), skat 
to taex (=tax ), and so on. The verbs yield in the same way: 
vaeljuete (= valwate), titsche {teach), katte {cut), klem {claim), 

w English Elements in the Norse Dialects of Utica, Wisconsin, Dialect Notes, 
yoI. ii, p. 257 ff. 

38 Connoisseurs will recall Abe Potash’s insurings. What we have here is the 
substitution of a familiar suffix for one of somewhat similar sound but much less 
familiar—a frequent cause of phonetic decay. 


424 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


savere {survey), refjuse {refuse). And the adjectives: plen 
{plain), jelds {jealous), kjokfuldt {chock-full), krese {crazy), aebel 
{able), klir {clear), pjur {pure), pur {poor). And the adverbs 
and adverbial phrases: ise {easy), reit eve {right awwy), aept to 
{apt to), allreit {all right). Dr. Flaten lists some extremely gro¬ 
tesque compound words, e. g., nekk-toi {necktie), kjaens-bogg 
{chinch-bug), hospaar {horse-power), gitte long {get along), hard- 
vaer-staar {hardware-store), staets-praessen {state s-prison), traevl- 
ing-maen {traveling-man), uxe-jogg {yoke of oxen), stimrbaat 
{steamboat). Pure Americanisms are not infrequent, e. g., bosta 
{busted), bes-baal {baseball), bogge {buggy), dipo {depot), frainv- 
hus {frame-house), jukre {to euchre), kaemp-mid’n ( camp-meeting ), 
kjors {chores), magis {moccasin), malasi {molasses), munke-rins 
(■ monkey-wrench ), raad-bas {road-boss), sjante {shanty), sorpreis- 
parti {surprise-party), strit-kar {street-car), tru trin {through 
train). The decayed American adverb is boldly absorbed, as in 
ban file baed { — he feels bad). “That this lingo/’ says Dr. Flaten, 
“will ever become a dialect of like importance with the Pennsylvania 
Dutch is hardly possible. . . . The Norwegians are among those of 
our foreign-born citizens most willing to part with their mother 
tongue.” But meanwhile it is spoken by probably half a million of 
them, and it will linger in isolated farming regions for years. 


7 . 


Swedish 

A useful study of American-Swedish is to be found in “Vart 
Sprak,” by Vilhelm Berger, 29 editor of the Swedish semi-weekly, 
Nordstjeman, published in New York. In his preface to his little 
book Mr. Berger mentions two previous essays upon the same sub¬ 
ject: “Det Svenske Spraket in Amerika,” by Rector Gustav Andreen, 
of Rock Island, Ill., and “Engelskans Inflytande pa Svenska 
Spraket in Amerika,” by Dr. E. A. Zetterstrand, but I have been 
unable to gain access to either. Mr. Berger says that the Swedes 


“Rock Island, Ill., 1912. 


APPENDIX 


425 


who come to America quickly purge their speech of the Swedish 
terms indicating the ordinary political, social and business relations 
and adopt the American terms bodily. Thus, borgmdstere is dis¬ 
placed by mayor, lansman by sheriff, hdradsskrifvare by county- 
clerk, centraluppvarmning med dnga by steamAieat, and ananas by 
pineapple, the Swedish measurements give way to mile, inch, pound, 
acre, etc., and there is an immediate adoption of such characteristic 
Americanisms as graft, trust, ring, janitor, surprise-party, bay-win¬ 
dow, bluff, commencement (college), homestead, buggy and pull. 
Loan-words taken into American from other immigrant languages 
go with the purely English terms, e. g., luff a (= to loaf, from the 
German) and vigilans {= vigilantes, from the Spanish). Many of 
these borrowings are adapted to Swedish spelling, and so sidewalk 
becomes sajdoak, street becomes strit, fight becomes fajt, business 
becomes bissness, and housecleaning becomes husklining. But even 
more important is the influence that American English has upon 
the vocabulary that remains genuinely Swedish; when words are 
not borrowed bodily they often change the form of familiar Swedish 
words. Thus sdngkammare { — bedroom) is abandoned for bad- 
drum, husallsgoromdl {= housework ) gives way to husarbete, kabel- 
telegram to kabelgram, brandsoldat { =fireman) to brandman, 
regnby {=rainstorm) to regnstorm, brekfort {=postcard ) to post- 
kort, and bestalla {—order) to ordra. The Swedish-American no 
longer speaks of frihet; instead he uses fridom, an obvious offspring 
of freedom<. His wife abandons the liattndl for the hattpinne. He 
acquires a hemadress {—home address) in place of his former 
bostadsadress. Instead of kyrkogard {= churchyard) he uses 
grafgdrd {= graveyard). For godstdg {= goods-train) he substi¬ 
tutes frakttag {— freight-train). In place of words with roots that 
are Teutonic he devises words with roots that have been taken into 
English from the Latin, the Greek or the French, e.g., investigera, 
krusad, minoritetsrapport, officerare, audiens, affar, exkursion, evan- 
gelist, hospital, liga {— league), residens, sympati. 

This influence of American extends to grammar and syntax. The 
inflections of Swedish tend to fall off in the United States, as the 
inflections of German have fallen off among the Pennsylvania Ger¬ 
mans. And the Americanized Swede gradually acquires a habit of 


426 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


putting his sentences together English-fashion. At home he would 
say Brodema Anderson, just as the German would say Oebriidcr 
Anderson, but in America he says Anderson Brodema. In Sweden 
all over is ofverallt; in America, following the American construc¬ 
tion, it becomes allt ofver. Mina vdrmer (= my friend) is Ameri¬ 
canized into en van af mina { = a friend of mine). Tid efter annan 
(literally, time after another) becomes frdn tid till tid (— from time 
to time). The American verb to take drags its Swedish relative, 
taga, into strange places, as in taga kallt {=to take cold), taga noje i 
{=to take pleasure in), taga fordel af (=to take advantage of), 
and taga taget {—to take a train). The thoroughly American use 
of right is imitated by a similar use of its equivalent, ratt, as in ratt 
af {=right off), ratt ivag {=right away) and ratt intill {—right 
next to). The Swede at home says hdr i landet {=here in this coun¬ 
try) ; in America he says i det hdr landet {= in this here country). 
All right, well and other such American counter-words he adopts 
instantly, just as he adopts hell and damn. He exiles the preposi¬ 
tion, imitating the American vulgate, to the end of the sentence. He 
begins to use the Swedish af precisely as if it were the English of, 
and i as if it were in. After a few years his Swedish is so heavy with 
American loan-words and American idioms that it is almost unin¬ 
telligible to his brother recently arrived from home. 


8 . 


Dutch 

The Dutch language exists in two forms in the United States, 
both differentiated from the original Dutch of Holland by the influ¬ 
ence of American-English. The first is the so-called Jersey, or 
Bergen County Dutch, which is spoken by the descendants of seven¬ 
teenth century Dutch settlers in Bergen and Passaic counties, Hew 
Jersey. In New York, as everyone knows, Dutch completely disap¬ 
peared many years ago, but in these Jersey counties it still survives, 
though apparently obsolescent, and is spoken by many persons who 
are not of Dutch blood, including a few negroes. The second variety 



APPENDIX 


427 


of Americanized Dutch is spoken by more recent immigrants, chiefly 
in Michigan. There is little if any communication between the two 
dialects. 

An excellent short study of Jersey Dutch was published by Dr. 
J. Dyneley Prince in 1910; 30 it remains the only one in print. The 
dialect, says Dr. Prince, “was originally the South Holland or Flem¬ 
ish language, which, in the course of centuries ( ca . 1630-1880), 
became mixed with and partially influenced by English, having bor¬ 
rowed also from the Mindi (Lenape-Delaware) Indian language a 
few animal and plant names. This Dutch has suffered little or noth¬ 
ing from modern Holland or Flemish immigration, although Pater¬ 
son (the county seat of Passaic County) has at present a large Neth¬ 
erlands population. The old county people hold themselves strictly 
aloof from these foreigners, and say, when they are questioned as 
to the difference between the idioms: ‘Onze tal az lex dauts en 
hoelliz as Hollans; kwait daafrent’ (our language is low Dutch and 
theirs is Holland Dutch; quite different). An intelligent Fleming 
or South Hollander with a knowledge of English can make shift at 
following a conversation in this Americanized Dutch, but the con¬ 
verse is not true.” 

As usual, contact with English has worn off the original inflections, 
and the definite and indefinite articles, de and en, are uniform for all 
genders. The case-endings have nearly all disappeared, in the com¬ 
parison of adjectives the superlative affix has decayed from -st to -s, 
the person-endings in the conjugation of verbs have fallen off, and 
the pronouns have been much simplified. The vocabulary shows 
many signs of English influence. A large number of words in daily 
use have been borrowed bodily, e. g., bottle, town, railroad, cider, 
smoke, potato, match, good-bye. Others have been borrowed with 
changes, e.g., sans (since), ma'am (mam), belange (belong), boddere 
(bother), baaznas (business), orek (earache). In still other cases 
the drag of English is apparent, as in blaubciase, a literal translation 
of blueberry (the standard Dutch word is heidebes), in mep’Voom 
(= mapletree; Dutch, ahoomboom), and in njeuspampir (= news¬ 
paper; Dutch, nieuwsblad). A few English archaisms are preserved 

80 The Jersey Dutch Dialect, Dialect Note*, vol. iii, pp. 459 ff. 



428 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


in the dialect; for example, the use of gentry as a plural for gentle¬ 
man. 

The Dutch spoken by the colonists from Holland in Michigan has 
been very extensively modified by American influences, both in vocab¬ 
ulary and in grammar. As in Jersey Dutch and in South African 
Dutch there has been a decay of inflections, and the neuter article het 
has been absorbed by the masculine-feminine article de. Says Prof. 
Henry J. G. Van Andel, of the chair of Dutch history, literature and 
art in Calvin College at Grand Rapids: “Almost all the American 
names of common objects, e. g., stove, mail, carpet, bookcase, kitchen, 
store, post-office, hose, dress, pantry, porch, buggy, picture, news¬ 
paper, ad, road, headline, particularly when they differ considerably 
from the Dutch terms, have been taken into the everyday vocabulary. 
This is also true of a great many verbs and adjectives, e. g., to move 
(mo even ), to dig ( diggen ), to shop ( shoppen ), to drive (dryven: a 
meaning different from the standard Dutch one), slow, fast, easy, 
pink, etc. The religious language has remained pure, but even here 
purity has only a relative meaning, for the constructions employed 
are often English.” This corrupted vulgate is called Yankee-Dutch 
by the Hollanders of Michigan, and, like Pennsylvania German, it 
has begun to produce a literature, chiefly humorous in character. A 
little book of sketches by Dirk Nieland, called “Yankee-Dutch,” 31 
contains some amusing specimens, e. g., piezelmietje (= pleased to 
meet you), and “You want ’n ander kop koffie .” From an anonymous 
piece kindly supplied by Dr. John J. Hiemenga, president of Calvin 
College, I extract the following: 

’t Had tamelijk ferm gesneeuwd de laatste twee dagen, zoodat de farmers 
took nog een sleeride konden krijgen in het bijna vervlogen jaar. Vooral de 
young folks hunkerden naar een cutter-ride. Bijna allerwege in den omtrek van 
de Star Corners waren de cutters dan ook voor den dag gehaald en nagezien, 
want alles moest natuurlijk in running-order zijn. De dust moest er afgeveegd, 
hier en daar een bur wat aangetight, de kussens een weinig opgefixt, en de bells 
vooral nauwkeurig onderzoeht. 

Dit was hedenmiddag ook Frits zijn job geweest, met het doel hedenavond zijn 
eerste ride in de mooie cutter can Klaas Ekkel, biji wien hij als winterknecht 
diende, te nemen. Hij begon dan ook al vroeg met de chores, molk in a hurry 

a Yankee-Dutch, humoristische schetsen uit het Hollandsch-Amerikaansche 
volksleven; Grand Rapids, Mich., 1919. 


APPENDIX 


429 


en was daarmee dus tijdig klaar. ’t Supper werd even vlug verorberd, zoodat 
Frits om half-zeven al in de barn was, om Florie op te hiohen. 

Trotsch op haar nieuw harness en scballende bellen, draaft Florie gezwind en 
fier daarheen. Hier en daar waar een oude railfence de sneeuw opving, zoodat 
de road bijna geheel opgeblokt is, gaat of rakelings langs de»andere fence of over 
de fields. Wei zijn er van daag een paar teams langs gegaan, docli de sneeuw 
en de wind bebben hun tracks geheel opgecoverd, zoodat Frits zijn eigen pad 
maar moet maken. 

Dat’t vinnig koud is voelt hij niet, dank zij zijn dikke furcoat. Voelt hij de 
koude echter niet, hooren deed hij haar wel. War knarst en giert die sneeuw 
onder de runners! Ook de milliarden fonkelende sneeuwkelkjes, die met even- 
veel kleuren het licht der halve maan weerkaatsen, getuigen van de koude. 
Frits geniet dit schoone kleurenspel en verzinkt weldra in diep gepeins. Plot- 
seling schrikt hij op. 

“Hello, Frits, going to the store!” 

“Ja, Henry, als je er in jumpen wilt, kan je zoover meerijden, maar’t is haast 
te veel troebel voor ’t geld.” 

Henry wil ook kunnen zeggen, dat hij van avond een cutter-ride gehad heeft 
en stapt dus in. Nog enkele rods en ze zijn bij de stables achter de kerk, waar 
ze ’t paard stallen en nu naar de store. Zoo ’n country-store is de lievelingsplek 
van de meeste jongens uit den omtrek, als ’s avonds het werk aan kant is. 
Enkele loafers maken zoo’n store hun home. Heel gezelling is men ’s avonds 
soms bij elkaar. Is her een onnoozele bloed aanwezig, dan heeft men wat fun 
met hem. Stories hoort men er bij de wholesale. Twijfelt Jan er aan of Piet 
wel een barrel met salt kan tillen, dan noopt een “I’ll bet you the cigars” hem 
om te zwijgen of te wedden. Voor cigars, peanuts en candy wordt er dan ook 
heel wat geld gespend. . . . 

This curious dialect promises to be short of life. On the one hand 
the leaders among the colonists strive to make them use a purer Dutch 
and on the other hand the younger members, particularly those born 
in America, abandon both good and bad Dutch for English. I am 
informed by various observers in Grand Rapids and its vicinity that 
there seems to be but small prospect that Yankee-Dutch will survive 
as long as Pennsylvania German. 32 

33 1 am indebted to Prof. B. K. Kuiper, to Mr. H. H. D. Langereis, to Mr. D. J. 
Van Riemsdyck, of the Eerdmans-Sevensma Co., the Dutch publishers of Grand 
Rapids, and to Dr. Paul H. De Kruif, late of the Rockefeller Institute, for aid 
and suggestions. 


430 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


9. 

Icelandic 

The only study that I have been able to find of the changes under¬ 
gone by Icelandic in America is a brief but informative note on the 
inflection of loan-nouns by Vilhjaimer Stefansson, 33 the well-known 
arctic explorer, who was born of Icelandic parents in Canada. There 
are relatively few Icelanders in the United States and most of them 
are concentrated in a few North Dakota and Minnesota counties. 
There are many more in Manitoba. Their language, philologically, 
is one of the most ancient of Europe, for the remote situation and 
poor communications of Iceland have served to preserve many early 
Teutonic characters that have long since vanished from the related 
languages. It is, of course, highly inflected, and the most interesting 
thing about its relations with American English in the United States 
is the sturdy way in which it fastens inflections upon loan-words from 
the latter. “No word,” says Mr. Stefansson, “can be used in Icelandic 
without being assigned a gender-form distinguished by the post-posi¬ 
tive article.” This law produces some curious effects when English 
nouns are taken in. The very American baseball, buggy, candy, 
cyclone and com-starch are all neuter, but beer, boss, cowboy, cow¬ 
catcher, nickel and populist are masculine, and tie (railroad), pro¬ 
hibition and siding are feminine. In the case of many words usage 
varies. Thus caucus has no fixed gender; different speakers make it 
masculine, feminine or neuter. Crackers and automobile are other 
such words. Banjo may be either feminine or neuter, bicycle may 
be either masculine or neuter, and broncho may be either masculine 
or feminine. The gender of such loan-words tends to be logical, but 
it is not always so. Farmer is always masculine and so is engineer, 
and nurse is always feminine, but dressmaker is given the masculine 
post-positive article, becoming dressmakerinn. However, when the 
pronoun is substituted, hun, which is feminine, is co mm only used. 
Words ending in -l or -II are usually considered neuter, e. g., baseball, 
corral, hotel, hall. “A striking example,” says Mr. Stefansson, “is 

n English Loan-Nouns Used in the Icelandic Colony of North Dakota, Dialect 
Notes, vol. ii, pp. 354 ff. 


APPENDIX 


431 


the term constable. The natural gender is evidently masculine and 
the Icelandic equivalent, logreglumathur, is masculine; yet constable 
is usually employed as a neuter, though occasionally as a masculine.” 
Words in -er fall under the influence of the Icelandic masculine nouns 
in -ari, denoting agency, and so usually become masculine, e. g., di¬ 
rector, ginger, mower, parlor, peddler, reaper, separator. Repub¬ 
lican and socialist are masculine, but democrat is neuter. Why cash¬ 
book, clique, contract, election and grape should be feminine it is 
hard to understand. Of the 467 loan-nouns listed by Mr. Stefansson, 
176 are neuters and 137 are masculines. There are but 44 clear 
feminines, though 80 others are sometimes feminine. 

On the syntax of American-Icelandic I can find nothing. The 
literature of the dialect is not extensive, and it has produced very 
few writers of any ability. Nearly all the Icelandic periodicals of 
the New World are published in Canada, chiefly at Winnipeg. 34 
They are conducted, in the main, by natives of Iceland, and hence 
endeavor to preserve the purity of the language. But the Icelander 
born in America prefers to speak English, and even when he essays 
Icelandic he fills it with English words and phrases. 


10 . 


Greek 

I am informed by Mr. S. S. Lontos, editor of Atlantis, the Greek 
newspaper published in New York, that Greek journalists and other 
writers working in the United States try to avoid the use of Ameri¬ 
canisms in their writing, and that the same care is observed by edu¬ 
cated Greeks in conversation. But the masses of Greek immigrants 
imitate the newcomers of all other races by adopting Americanisms 
wholesale. In most cases the loan-words, as in Italian, undergo 
changes. Thus, bill-of-fare becomes biloferi, pie changes to pya, sign 
and shine to saina (there is no sA-sound in Greek), cream to creamy, 
fruit-store to fruitaria, clams to clammess, steak to stecky, polish to 

84 Icelandic-American Periodicals, by Hallddr Hermannsson, Pub. Soc. for the 
Advancement of Scandinavian Study, vol. iii, no. 2; Urbana, Ill., July, 1916. 


432 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


'policy, hotel to otelli, stand to stanza, lease to list a, depot to depos, car 
to carron (— Modem Greek, karron, a cart), picture to pitsa, elevar 
tor and elevated to elevata, and so on. The Greeks suffer linguistic 
confusion immediately they attempt English, for in Modem Greek 
nay (spelled nai ) means yes, P. M. indicates the hours before noon, 
and the letter N stands for South. To make things even worse, the 
Greek papoose means grandfather and mammie means grandmother. 

So far as I know, no philological study of American Greek has 
been made. Undoubtedly all the processes of decay that have been 
going on in Greece itself for centuries will be hastened in this coun¬ 
try. Whenever English begins to influence another language it plays 
havoc with the inflections. 


11 . 

The Slavic Languages 

So far as I have been able to discover there is no literature in Eng¬ 
lish upon the philological results of transplanting the Slavic lan¬ 
guages, Polish, Czech, Serbian and Bulgarian, to America. Dr. C. 
H. Wachtel, editor of the Dziennik Chicagoski, the Polish daily 
newspaper published in Chicago, informs me that the Polish spoken 
in the United States has “taken over a great multitude of English 
words and phrases,” and says that the Rev. B. E. Goral, a priest of 
Milwaukee, has written several articles in Polish upon the subject 
and collected a vocabulary. But I have been unable to get into com¬ 
munication with Father Goral. I am likewise informed by the editor 
of the Svomost, the Bohemian daily of Chicago, that a study of the 
changes undergone by Czech in the United States has been published 
by Dr. J. Salaba Vojan, of Chicago, but my inquiries of Dr. 
Vojan are unanswered. Regarding Serbian and Bulgarian I have 
been unable to obtain any information whatever. Of late years sev¬ 
eral chairs of Slavic languages and literatures have been set up in 
American universities. It is to be hoped that among the students 
they attract there will be some who will devote themselves to the 
transplanted living tongues as the scholars of the Middle West have 
devoted themselves to Dano-Norwegian. 


APPENDIX 


433 


III. 

Proverb and Platitude 

Ho people, save perhaps the Spaniards, have a richer store of 
proverbial wisdom than the Americans, and surely none other makes 
more diligent and deliberate efforts to augment its riches. The 
American literature of “inspirational” platitude is enormous and 
almost unique. There are half a dozen authors, e. g., Dr. Orison 
Swett Marden and Dr. Frank Crane, who devote themselves almost 
exclusively, and to vast profit, to the composition of arresting and 
uplifting apothegms, and the fruits of their fancy are not only sold 
in books but also displayed upon an infinite variety of calendars, 
banners and wall-cards. It is rarely that one enters the office of an 
American business man without encountering at least one of these 
wall-cards. It may, on the one hand, show nothing save a succinct 
caution that time is money, say, “Do It How,” or “This Is My Busy 
Day”; on the other hand, it may embody a long and complex senti¬ 
ment, ornately set forth. The taste for such canned sagacity seems 
to have arisen in America at a very early day. Benjamin Franklin’s 
“Poor Richard’s Almanac,” begun in 1732, remained a great success 
for twenty-five years, and the annual sales reached 10,000. It had 
many imitators, and founded an aphoristic style of writing which 
culminated in the essays of Emerson, often mere strings of sonorous 
certainties, defectively articulated. The “Proverbial Philosophy” of 
Martin Farquhar Tupper, dawning upon the American public in the 
early 40’s, was welcomed with enthusiasm; as Saintsbury says, 35 its 
success on this side of the Atlantic even exceeded its success on the 
other. But that was the last and perhaps the only importation of 
the sage and mellifluous in bulk. In late years the American pro¬ 
duction of such merchandise has grown so large that the balance of 
trade now flows in the other direction. Every traveling American 
must have observed the translations of the chief works of Dr. Marden 
that are on sale in all the countries of Europe, and with them the 
masterpieces of such other apostles of the Hew Thought as Ralph 

* Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xiii, p. 167. 


434 


THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 


Waldo Trine and Elizabeth Towne. No other American hooks are 
half so well displayed. 

The note of all such literature, and of the maxims that precipitate 
themselves from it, is optimism. They “inspire” by voicing and re¬ 
voicing the New Thought doctrine that all things are possible to the 
man who thinks the right sort of thoughts—in the national phrase, to 
the right-thinker. This right-thinker is the complement of the 
forward-looker whose belief in the continuity and benignity of the 
evolutionary process takes on the virulence of a religious faith. Out 
of his confidence come the innumerable saws, axioms and gefliigelte 
Worte in the national arsenal, ranging from the “It won’t hurt none 
to try” of the great masses of the plain people to such exhilarating 
confections of the wall-card virtuosi as “The elevator to success is 
not running; take the stairs.” Naturally enough, a grotesque humor 
plays about this literature of hope; the folk, though it moves them, 
prefer it with a dash of salt. “Smile, damn you, smile!” is a typical 
specimen of this seasoned optimism. Many examples of it go back 
to the early part of the last century, for instance, “Don’t monkey 
with the buzz-saw,” “The silent hog eats the swill,” and “It will 
never get well if you pick it.” Others are patently modern, e. g., 
“The Lord is my shepherd; I should worry” and “Roll over; you’re 
on your back.” The national talent for extravagant and pungent 
humor is well displayed in many of these maxims. It would be diffi¬ 
cult to match, in any other folk-literature, such examples as “I’d 
rather have them say ‘There he goes’ than ‘Here he lies,’ ” or “Don’t 
spit: remember the Johnstown flood,” or “Shoot it in the leg; your 
arm’s full,” or “Foolishness is next to happiness,” or “Work is the 
curse of the drinking classes,” or “It’s better to be a has-been than 
a never-was,” or “Cheer up; there ain’t no hell,” or “If you want to 
cure homesickness, go back home.” Many very popular phrases and 
proverbs are borrowings from above. “Few die and none resign” 
originated with Thomas Jefferson; Bret Harte, I believe, was the 
author of “No check-ee, no shirt-ee,” General W. T. Sherman is com¬ 
monly credited with “War is hell,” and Mark Twain with “Life is 
one damn thing after another.” An elaborate and highly charac¬ 
teristic proverb of the uplifting variety—“So live that you can look 
any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell”—was first given cur¬ 
rency by one of the engineers of the Panama Canal, a gentleman 


APPENDIX 


435 


later retired, it would seem, for attempting to execute his own coun¬ 
sel. From humor the transition to cynicism is easy, and so many of 
the current sayings are at war with the optimism of the majority. 
“Kick him again; he’s down” is a depressing example. “What’s the 
use ?” is another. The same spirit is visible in “Tell your troubles 
to a policeman,” “How’d you like to he the iceman ?” “Some say she 
do and some say she don’t,” “Nobody loves a fat man,” “Ain’t it hell 
to be poor!”, “Have a heart!”, “I love my wife, but 0 you kid,” and 
“Would you for fifty cents?” The last originated in the ingenious 
mind of an advertisement writer and was immediately adopted. In 
the course of time it acquired a naughty significance, and helped to 
give a start to the amazing button craze of the first years of the cen¬ 
tury—a saturnalia of proverb and phrase making which finally 
aroused the guardians of the public morals and was put down by the 
Polizei. 

The war, as we have seen in the chapter on Slang, produced very 
little new slang, but the doughboys showed all the national talent for 
manufacturing proverbs and proverbial expressions, chiefly derisive. 
“Our American visitors,” said an English writer at the end of the 
war, “are startling London with vivid phrases. Some of them are 
well known by now. ‘Hurry up and get bom’ is one of them. Others 
are coming on, such as ‘Put crape on your nose; your brains are 
dead,’ and ‘Snow again, kid, I’ve lost your drift.’ ” 36 Perhaps the 
favorite in the army was “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken,” 
though “They say the first hundred years are the hardest” offered it 
active rivalry. Ho study of these military witticisms has been made. 
The whole subject of American proverbs, in fact, has been grossly 
neglected; there is not even a collection of them. The English pub¬ 
lisher, Frank Palmer, prints an excellent series of little volumes 
presenting the favorite proverbs of all civilized races, including the 
Chinese and Japanese, but there is no American volume among them. 
Nor is there one in the similar series issued by the Appeal to Reason. 
Even such exhaustive collections as that of Robert Christy 37 contain 
no American specimens—not even “Don’t monkey with the buzz- 
saw” or “Root, hog, or die.” 

M English, March, 1919, p. 6. 

"Proverbs, Maxims and Phrases of All Ages; New York, 1905. This work 
extends to 1267 pages and contains about 30,000 proverbs, admirably arranged, 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


[A few duplications will be found here. I have thought it better to make 
them than to use cross-references. In three or four cases works listed are marked 
“not published.” I have examined all of these; they will be published later on.] 

1. 

GEXERAL 

A. F. L.: English As She Is Spoke, Baltimore Evening Sun, "Nov. 18, 1920. 
Aldington, Richard: English and American, Poetry, May, 1920. 

Alford, Henry: A Plea for the Queen’s English; London, 1863. 

Allen, Grant: Americanisms (in Chambers’ Encyclopaedia, new ed.; Phila., 1906, 
vol. i). 

Anon.: American English (in America From a French Point of View; London, 
1897). 

-: Art. Americanisms, Everyman Encyclopaedia, ed. by Andrew Boyle; Lon¬ 
don, n. d. 

-: Art. Americanisms, New International Encyclopaedia, 2nd ed., ed. by 

F. M. Colby and Talcott Williams; New York, 1917. 

-: Americanisms, a Study of Words and Manners, Southern Review, vol. ix, 

p. 290 and p. 529. 

-: Americanisms, Academy, March 2, 18S9. 

-: Americanisms, Southern Literary Messenger, Oct., 1848. 

-: British Struggles With Our Speech, Literary Digest, June 19, 1915. 

-: English and American, Saturday Review, March 5, 1922. 

-: English With a Difference, Nation and Athenaeum, May 6, 1922. 

-: I Speak United States, Saturday Review, Sept. 22, 1894. 

-: Language, London Times Literary Supplement, April 6, 1922. 

-: Our Strange New Language, Literary Digest, Sept. 16, 1916. 

-: Progress of Refinement, New York Organ, May 29, 1847. 

-: Some So-called Americanisms, All the Year Round, vol. lxxvi, p. 38. 

-: The American English, Critic, vol. xiii, p. 115. 

-: The American Language, Putnam’s Magazine, Nov., 1870. 

-: The American Language, Weekly Westminster Gazette, April 8, 1922. 

-: The American Tongue, London Observer, March 17, 1922. 

-: The English Tongue, Westminster Gazette, March 17, 1922. 

-: The Great American Language, Comhill Magazine, vol. lviii, p. 363. 

-: They Spake With Diverse Tongues, Atlantic Monthly, July, 1909. 

-: To Teach the American Tongue in Britain, Literary Digest, Aug. 9, 1913. 

-: Triumphant Americanisms, New York Evening Post, June 11, 1921. 

436 

























BIBLIOGRAPHY 437 

Archer, William: America and the English Language, Pall Mall Magazine, Oct., 
1898. 

-: The American Language (in America To-day; New York, 1899). 

Ayres, Harry Morgan: The English Language in America (in The Cambridge 
History of American Literature; New York, 1921, vol. iv). 

Bache, Richard Meade: Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech, 2nd ed.; Phila., 
1869. 

Baker, Franklin T.: The Vernacular (in Munro’s Principles of Secondary Educa¬ 
tion; New York, 1915, ch. ix). 

Barentz, A. E.: Woordenboek der Engelsche Spreektaal . . . and Americanisms 
. . . ; Amsterdam, 1894. 

Barringer, G. A.: Etude sur 1’Anglais parl6 aux Etats Unis (la Langue Am6ri- 
caine), Actes de la SoeiSte Philologique de Paris, March, 1874. 

Bendelari, George: Curiosities of American Speech, New York Sun, Nov., 1895. 

Benet, W. C.: Americanisms: English as Spoken and Written in the United 
States; Abbeville (S. C.), 1880. 

Bicknall, Frank N.: The Yankee in British Fiction, Outlook, vol. xcvi, 1910. 

Bowen, Edwin W.: Briticisms vs. Americanisms, Popular Science Monthly, vol. 
lxix, p. 324. 

-: Questions at Issue in Our English Speech; New York, 1914. 

Bradley, W. A.: In Shakespeare’s America, Harper's Magazine, Aug., 1915. 

Bristed, Charles A.: The English Language in America (in Cambridge Essays; 
London, 1855). 

Bryant, William Cullen: Index Expurgatorius (reprinted in Helpful Hints in 
Writing and Reading, by Grenville Kleiser; New York, 1911, p. 15). 

Burton, Richard: American English (in Literary Likings; Boston, 1899). 

Buxton, Richard: The President’s American, London Outlook, May 20, 1922. 

Carter, Alice P.: American English, Critic, vol. xii, p. 97. 

Channing, William Ellery: The American Language and Literature, North 
American Review, Sept., 1815. 

Charters, W. W. (and Edith Miller): A Course of Study in Grammar Based 
Upon the Grammatical Errors of School Children of Kansas City, Mo., 
University of Missouri Bulletin, vol. xvi, No. 2, Jan., 1915. 

Chesterton, Cecil: British Struggles With Our Speech (summary of art. in New 
Witness), Literary Digest, June 19, 1915. 

Chubb, Percival: The Menace of Pedantry in the Teaching of English, School 
Review, vol. xx, Jan., 1912. 

Clemens, Samuel L. (Mark Twain) : Concerning the American Language (in The 
Stolen White Elephant; New York, 1888). 

Coxe, A. Cleveland: Americanisms in England, Forum, Oct., 1886. 

Crane, W. W.: The American Language, Putnam’s Monthly, vol. xvi, p. 519. 

Crosland, T. W.: The Abounding American; London, 1907. 

Darling, Gertrude: Standards in English, Education, vol. xvii, p. 331. 

Dilnot, Frank: The Written and Spoken Word (in The New America; New York, 
1919). 

Dorf, A. T.: Sproget (in De Forenede Stater, ed. by Evald Kristensen; Omaha, 
1922). 




438 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Douglas, James: The American Dialect, London Sunday Express, April 9, 1922. 

Eggleston, Edward: Wild Flowers of English Speech in America, Century Maga¬ 
zine, April, 1894. 

Field, Eugene: London letter in Chicago News, March 10, 1890. 

Fliigel, Felix: Die Englische Philologie in Nordamerika, Gersdorf's Repertorium, 
1852. 

-: Die Englische Sprache in Nordamerika, Arohiv fur das Studium der neu- 

eren Sprachen und Literaturen, band iv, heft i; Braunschweig, 1848. 

Fowler, H. W. (and F. G. Fowler) : The King’s English, 2nd ed.; Oxford, 1908. 

Fowler, Wm. C.: The English Language, . . . 2nd ed.; New York, 1855. 

Freeman, Edward A.: Some Points in American Speech and Customs, Longmans' 
Magazine , Nov., 1882. 

Gerek, William (and others) : Is There Really Such a Thing as the American 
Language? New York Sun, March 10, 1918. 

Gould, Edward S.: Good English . . . ; New York, 1867. 

Grandgent, C. H.: English in America, Die Neueren Sprachen, vol. ii, p. 243 and 
p. 520. 

Hall, Fitzward: Sundry “Americanisms,” Nation, vol. lvii, p. 484. 

-: Americanisms Again, Academy, vol. xlvii, p. 278. 

-: The American Dialect, Academy, vol. xliid, p. 265. 

-: English, Rational and Irrational, Nineteenth Century, Sept., 1880. 

-: Modern English; New York, 1873. 

-: Recent Exemplifications of False Philology; New York, 1872. 

Hartt, Irene Widdemar: Americanisms, Education, vol. xiii, p. 367. 

Hastings, Basil MacDonald: More Americanisms (interview), New York Tribune, 
Jan. 19, 1913. 

H. B.: The American Language, Manchester Guardian, March 28, 1922. 

Healy, J. F.: The American Language; Pittsburgh, 1910. 

Hempl, George: The Study of American English, Chautauquan, vol. xxii, p. 436. 

Herrig, Ludwig: Die Englische Sprache und Literatur in Nord-Amerika, Archiv 
fur das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, vol. xii, p. 241; 
vol. xiii, p. 76 and p. 241; vol. xiv, p. 1. 

Herron, James P.: American Grammar, Adapted to the National Language of 
the United States; Columbus, O., 1859. 

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth: English and American Phrases, Independent, 
vol. lii, p. 410. 

-: English and American Speech, Harper's Bazar, vol. xxx, p. 958. 

Hill, Adams Sherman: Our English; New York, 1889. 

Hodgins, Joseph L.: Our Common Speech, New York Sun, March 1, 1918. 

Holliday, Robert Cortes: Caun’t Speak the Language (in Walking-Stick Papers; 
New York, 1918, p. 201). 

Howells, William Dean: The Editor’s Study, Harper's Magazine, Jan., 1886. 

Hughes, Rupert: Our Statish Language, Harper's Magazine, May, 1920. 

Hurd, Seth T.: A Grammatical Corrector or Vocabulary of the Common Errors 
of Speech . . . ; Phila., 1847. 

J. D. J.: American Conversation, English Journal, April, 1913. 

James, Henry: TBe Question of Our Speech; Boston, 1905. 









BIBLIOGRAPHY 


439 


Kartzke, Georg: Die Amerikanische Sprache, Archiv fur das Studium der Neueren 
Sprachen und Literaturen, 1921, p. 181. 

Knortz, Karl: Amerikanische Redensarten und Volksgebrauche, Leipzig, 1907. 

Krapp, George Philip: Modern English; New York, 1910. 

Lang, Andrew: Americanisms, London Academy, March 2, 1895. 

Lienemann, Oskar: Eigentiimlichkeiten des Engl. d. Vereinigten Staaten Nebst 
Wenig Bekannten Amerikanismen; Zittau, 1886. 

Lloyd, R. J.: Northern English; Leipzig, 1908. 

Lodge, Henry Cabot: The Origin of Certain Americanisms, Scribner’s Magazine, 
June, 1907. 

-: Shakespeare’s Americanisms (in Certain Accepted Heroes; New York, 

1897). 

Lounsbury, Thomas R.: Americanisms Real or Reputed, Harper’s Magazine, 
Sept., 1913. 

-: Differences in English and American Usage, Harper’s Magazine, July, 

1913. 

-: The English of America, International Review, vol. viii, p. 472. 

-: A History of the English Language, revised ed.; New York, 1907. 

-: Linguistic Causes of Americanisms, Harper’s Magazine, June, 1913. 

——: Scotticisms and Americanisms, Harper’s Magazine, Feb., 1913. 

-: The Standard of Usage in English; New York and London, n. d. 

-: What Americanisms Are Not, Harper’s Magazine, March, 1913. 

Low, Sidney: Ought American to be Taught in Our Schools? Westminster 
Gazette, July 18, 1913. 

Lowell, James Russell: prefaces to The Biglow Papers, 1st and 2nd series; Cam¬ 
bridge, 1848-66. 

Mackay, Charles: The Ascertainment of English, Nineteenth Century, Jan., 1890. 

Macy, John: Our Barbarous Lingo, New York Nation, April 12, 1922. 

Mackintosh, Duncan: Essai Raisonne sur la Grammaire et la Prononciation 
Anglaise . . . ; Boston, 1797. 

Marshall, Archibald: American English and the English Language, North Amer¬ 
ican Review, Nov., 1921. 

Matthews, Brander: Americanisms and Briticisms . . . ; New York, 1892. 

-: American English and British English (in Essays on English, New York, 

1921.) 

-: Outskirts of the English Language, Munsey’s Magazine, Nov., 1913. 

-: Parts of Speech; New York, 1901. 

-: Why Not Speak Your Own Language? Delineator, Nov., 1917. 

Mead, Theo. H.: Our Mother Tongue; New York, 1890. 

Mencken, H. L.: The American: His Language, Smart Set, Aug., 1913. 

-: The American Language Again, New York Evening Mail, Nov. 22, 1917. 

-: American Pronouns, Baltimore Evening Sun, Oct. 25, 1910. 

-: How They Say It “Over There,” New York Evening Mail, Oct. 25, 1917. 

-: More American, Baltimore Evening Sun, Oct. 20, 1910. 

-: Moulding Our Speech, Chicago Tribune, Nov. 18, 1917. 

-: Notes on the American Language, Baltimore Evening Sun, Sept. 7, 1916. 

-: The Two Englishes, Baltimore Evening Sun, Sept. 15, 1910. 






















440 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Molee, Elias: Nu Tutonish, an International Union Language; Tacoma, 1906. 

-: Plea for an American Language . . . ; Chicago, 1888. 

-: Pure Saxon English; or, Americans to the Front; Chicago, 1890. 

-: Tutonish; Tacoma (Wash.), n. d. 

-: Tutonish, or, Anglo-German Union Tongue; Chicago, 1902. 

Moon, G. Washington: The Dean’s English, 7th ed.; New York, 1884. 
Newcomen, George: Americanisms and Archaisms, Academy, vol. xlvii, p. 317. 
Osborn, E. B.: The American Language, London Morning Post, March 10, 1922. 

-: Our Omnivorous Speech, London Sunday Times, March 19, 1922. 

Phipson, Evacuates A.: British vs. American English, Dialect Notes, vol. i, pt. i, 
1889. 

Proctor, Richard A.: Americanisms, Knowledge, vol. vii, p. 171. 

-: English and American-English, New York Tribune, Aug. 14, 1881. 

-: “English As She is Spoke” in America, Knowledge, vol. vi, p. 319. 

Rambeau, A.: Amerikanisches, Die Neueren Sprachen, vol. ii, p. 53. 

Read, Richard P.: The American Language, New York Sun, March 7, 1918. 

-: The American Tongue, New York Sun, Feb. 26, 1918. 

Russell, T. Baron: Current Americanisms; London, 1893. 

Scheie de Vere, M.: Americanisms: the English of the New World; New York, 
1872. 

-: Studies in English; New York, 1867. 

Schoch, Alfred D. (and R. Kron) : The Little Yankee: a Handbook of Idiomatic 
American English; Freiburg i. B., 1912. 

Schulz, Carl B.: The King’s English at Home, New York Evening Mail, Oct. 29, 
1917. 

Shipman, Carolyn: The American Language, Critic, new series, vol. xxxvi, p. 81. 
Smith, Chas. Forster: Americanisms, Southern Methodist Quarterly, Jan., 1891. 
Spies, Heinrich: Die Englische Sprache und das Neue England; Langensalza, 
1921. 

Stearns, Charles W.: Americanisms in Shakespeare’s Plays (in Shakespeare 
Treasury of Wisdom; New York, 1869). 

Swinton, William: English in America (in Rambles Among Words; New York, 
1872). 

Sykes, Fred H.: American Speech and Standard English, Our Language, vol. ii, 
p. 52. 

Trench, Richard C.: English Past and Present; London, 1855; rev. ed., 1905. 

-: On the Study of Words; London, 1851; rev. ed., 1904. 

Tucker, Gilbert M.: American English; New York, 1921. 

-: American English (in Our Common Speech; New York, 1895). 

-: American English, North American Review, April, 1883. 

-: American English, a Paper Read Before the Albany Institute, July 6, 1882, 

With Revision and Additions; Albany, 1883. 

Tuttle, R. M.: Americanisms, Athenaeum, vol. i, p. 209. 

Untermeyer, Louis: Whitman and the American Language, New York Evening 
Post, May 31, 1919. 

Van der Voort, J. H.: Hedendaagsche Amerikanismen; Gouda (Holland), 1894. 















BIBLIOGRAPHY 


441 


Wardlaw, Patterson: Simpler English, Bulletin of the University of South Caro¬ 
lina, no. 38, pt. iii, July, 1914. 

Warren, Arthur: Real Americanisms, Boston Herald, Nov. 20, 1892. 

Watts, Harvey M.: Prof. Lounsbury and His Rout of the Dons on Americanisms, 
Philadelphia Public Ledger, April 16, 1915. 

Wetherill, George N.: The American Language, Anglo-Continental, Jan., 1894. 

Wheeler, Benjamin Ide: Americanisms (in Johnson’s Cyclopedia, new ed.; New 
York, 1S93). 

Whibley, Charles: The American Language, Bookman, Jan., 1908. 

White, Richard Grant: American Speech (in Every-Day English; Boston, 1880). 

-: Americanisms, parts i-viii, Atlantic Monthly, April, May, July, Sept., Nov., 

1878; Jan., March, May, 1879. 

-: British Americanisms, Atlantic Monthly, May, 1880. 

-: Every-Day English . . . ; Boston, 1880. 

-: Some Alleged Americanisms, Atlantic Monthly, Dec., 1883. 

-: British-English and American-English (in Words and Their Uses; New 

York, 1870; rev. ed., New York, 1876). 

Whitman, Walt: An American Primer; Boston, 1904. 

Williams, Ralph O.: Some Peculiarities, Real and Supposed, in American Eng¬ 
lish (in Our Dictionaries and Other English Language Topics; New York, 
1890). 

Witherspoon, John: various notes on Americanisms in vol. iv of his Works; 
Phila., 1801. 


2 . 


DICTIONARIES OF AMERICANISMS 

Bartlett, John Russell: A Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as 
Peculiar to the United States; New York, 1848; 2nd ed., enlarged, Boston, 
1859; 3rd ed., 1860; 4th ed., 1877. 

Beck, T. Romeyn: Notes on Mr. Pickering’s Vocabulary, . . . Transactions of the 
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Clapin, Sylva: A New Dictionary of Americanisms . . . ; New York, 1902. 

Elwyn, A. L.: A Glossary of Supposed Americanisms . . . ; Phila., 1859. 

Fallows, Samuel: Dictionary of Americanisms, Briticisms, etc. (in Synonyms 
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-: Handbook of Briticisms, Americanisms, Colloquial and Provincial Words 

and Phrases; Chicago, 1883. 

Farmer, John S.: Americanisms Old and New . . . ; London, 1889. 

Hagar, George J. (ed.) : Dictionary of Americanisms (in New Universities 
Dictionary; New York, 1915). 

Halliwell-Phillips, J. O.: A Dictionary of Archaisms and Provincialisms, Con¬ 
taining Words Now Obsolete in England, All of Which Are Familiar and 
in Common Use in America; 2nd ed.; London, 1850. 

Keijzer, M.: Woordenboek van Amerikanismen . . . ; Gorinchem (Holland), 
1854. 

Koehler, F.: Worterbuch der Amerikanismen . . . ; Leipzig, 1866. 








442 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Pickering, John: A Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have 
Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America . . . ; Boston, 
1816. 

Thornton, Richard H.: An American Glossary, ... 2 vols.; Phila. and London, 
1912. 


3. 


THE PROCESS OF LANGUAGE GROWTH 

A. H. N.: Some New “American Words,” Dial, vol. xiv, p. 302. 

Anon.: Language, London Times Literary Supplement, April 6, 1922. 

-: Political Americanisms, Saturday Review, vol. lx, p. 709. 

-: The Decay of Syntax, London Times Supplement, May 8, 1919, p. 1. 

-: Words Popularized by the Bicycle, New York Times Saturday Review, 

Aug. 7, 1897. 

Bergen, Fanny D.: Folk-Names of Animals, Jour. Am. Folk-Lore, vol. xii, p. 291. 

-: Popular' American Plant-Names, Jour. Am. Folk-Lore, vol. v, p. 89. 

Bergstrom, G. A.: On Blendings of Synonyms or Cognate Expressions in English; 
Lund (Sweden), 1906. 

Bradley, Henry: The Making of English; London. 1904. 

Brandenburg, George C.: Psychological Aspects of Language, Journal of Educa¬ 
tional Psychology, June, 1918. 

Buck, Gertrude: Make-Believe Grammar, School Review, vol. xxii, Jan., 1909. 
Buehler, H. G.: A Modern English Grammar; New York, 1900. 

Crabtree, W. A.: Primitive Speech; London, 1922. 

Davis, W. M.: New Terms in Geology, Science, new series, vol. vi. p. 24. 

Earle, John: The Philology of the English Tongue; London, 1866; 5th ed., 1892. 

-•: A Simple Grammar of English Now in Use; London, 1898. 

Ernst, C. W.: Words Coined in Boston, New England Magazine, vol. xv, p. 337. 
Fehr, Bernhard: Zur Agglutination in der Englischen Sprache; Zurich, 1910. 
Fiske, John: The Genesis of Language, North American Review, Oct., 1869, p. 20. 
Fowler, H. W.: Shall and Will, Should and Would, in the Newspapers Today 
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Franzmeyer, F.: Studien uber den Konsonantismus und Vokalismus der Neu- 
englischen Dialekte; Strassburg, 1906. 

Greenough, James B. (and George L. Kittredge) : Words and Their Ways in 
English Speech; New York, 1902. 

Hayward, S.: Popular Names of American Plants, Jour. Am. Folk-Lore, vol. iv, 
p. 147. 

Helfenstein, James: A Comparative Grammar of the Teutonic Languages . . . ; 
London, 1870. 

Horn, W.: Historische Neuenglische Grammatik; Strassburg, 1908. 

-: Untersuchungen zur Neuenglischen Lautgeschichte; Strassburg, 1905. 

Kaluza, Max: Historische Grammatik der Englischen Sprache, 2 vols. Berlin, 
1900-1. 

Jespersen, Otto: Chapters on English; London, 1918. 

-: Growth and Structure of the English Language; Leipzig, 1905; 2nd ed., 

1912; 3rd ed., rev., 1919. 









BIBLIOGRAPHY 


443 


Jespersen, Otto: Language: Its Nature, DeA^elopment and Origin; London, 1922. 

-: A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles; Part I, Sounds 

and Spellings, 3rd ed.; Heidelberg, 1922; Part II, Syntax, 2nd ed., Heidel¬ 
berg, 1922. 

Kellner, Leon: Historical Outlines of English Syntax; London, 1892. 

Kellog, Walter Guest: Is Grammar Useless? North American Review, July, 1920. 

Klein, E.: Die Verdunkelten Wortzusammensetzungen im Neuenglischen; 
Konigsberg, 1911. 

Marsh, George P.: Lectures on the English Language; New York, 1859; 4th ed., 
enlarged, 1870. 

-: The Origin and History of the English Language; New York, 1862; rev. 

ed., 1885. 

Matthews, Brander: Essays on English; New York, 1921. 

Mead, Leon: Word Coinages; New York, 1902. 

Micholson, G. A.: English Words with Native Roots and with Greek, Latin, or 
Romance Suffixes; Chicago, 1916. 

Morris, Richard: Historical Outlines of English Accidence; London, 1872; 2nd 
ed., rev., 1895. 

Murison, W.: Changes in the Language Since Shakespeare’s Time (in The Cam¬ 
bridge History of English Literature, vol. xiv; New York, 1917). 

Nicholson, George A.: English Words with Native Roots, and with Greek, Latin, 
or Romance Suffixes (University of Chicago, Linguistic Studies in Ger¬ 
manic, No. Ill) ; Chicago, 1916. 

Norton, Chas. Ledyard: Political Americanisms . . . ; New York and London, 
1890. 

Pope, Michael: Words on Trial, English, Sept., 1919, p. 150. 

Pound, Louise: Backward Spellings, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 303. 

-: Blends: Their Relation to English Word Formation; Heidelberg, 1914. 

-: Indefinite Composites and Word-Coinage, Modern Language Review, 1913. 

-: Intrusive Nasals in Present-Day English, Englische Studien, vol. xlv, 1912. 

-: Pluralization of Latin Loan-Words in Present-Day American Speech, 

Classical Journal, vol. xv, no. 3 (Dec., 1919). 

-: Some English “Stretch-Forms,” Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 52. 

-: Some Plural-Singular Forms, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 48. 

-: “Stunts” in Language, English Journal, vol. ix, p. 88. 

-: Transposition of Syllables in English, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 51. 

-: Vogue Affixes in Present-Day Word-Coinage, Dialect Notes, vol. v, p. 1. 

-: Word-Coinage and Modern Trade-Names, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 29. 

Poutsma, H.: A Grammar of Late Modern English, 2 vols.; Groningen, 1904-5. 

Sapir, Edward: Language; New York, 1921. 

Sayce, A. H.: Introduction to the Science of Language, 2 vols.; 4th ed., London. 

1900. 

Schroder, H.: Streckformen, ein Beitrag zur Lehre von der Wortenstehung und 
der Germanischen Wortbetonung; Heidelberg, 1906. 

Sturtevant, E. H.: Linguistic Change; Chicago, 1917. 

Sunden, Karl: Contributions to the Study of Elliptical Words in Modern Eng¬ 
lish; Upsala (Sweden), 1904. 

Tweedle, W. M.: Popular Etymology, Modern Language Notes, vol. vii, p. 377. 
















444 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Weekley, Ernest: An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English; New York, 1921. 
Whitney, William D.: The Life and Growth of Language; New York, 1875. 

-: Language and the Study of Language; New York, 1867. 

Wilcox, W. H.: The Difficulties Created by the Grammarians Are to Be Ignored, 
Atlantic Educational Journal, Nov., 1912. 

Wittmann, Elisabeth: Clipped Words: A Study of Back-Formations and Cur¬ 
tailments in Present-Day English, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 115. 

Wood, F. A.: Iteratives, Blends and “Streckformen,” Modem Philology, Oct., 
1911. 

-: Language and Nonce-Words, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 42. 

Wyld, H. C.: The Growth of English; London, 1907. 

-: The Historical Study of the Mother Tongue; New York, 1906. 

-: A History of Modern Colloquial English; London, 1920. 

4. 


LOAK-WOBDS 

Ben Aryah, Israel: The Hebrew Element in English, English, April, 1920, p. 331; 
May, p. 351. 

Blackmar, F. W.: Spanish-American Words, Modem Language Notes, vol. vi, 
p. 91. 

Bowen, Edwin W.: The English Speech on Irish Lips, Atlantic Monthly, vol. 
lxxviii, p. 575. 

-: Some Disputed Hibernicisms, Dial, vol. xxii, p. 43. 

Burke, William: The Anglo-Irish Dialect, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 1896. 

Carpenter, W. H.: Dutch Contributions to the Vocabulary of English in America, 
Modem Philology, July, 1908. 

Chamberlain, A. F.: Algonquin Words in American English, Jour. Am. Folk- 
Lore, vol. xv, p. 240. 

Chapin, Florence A.: Spanish Words That Have Become Westernisms, Editor, 
July 25, 1917. 

English, Thomas Dunn: Irish in America, New York Times Saturday Review, 
Nov. 5, 1898. 

G. D. C.: Russian Words in Kansas, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 161. 

Gerard, W. R.: Dictionary of Words Introduced into English from American 
Indian Languages ( not published). 

Griffis, William Elliot: The Dutch Influence in New England, Harper’s Magazine, 
vol. lxxxviii, p. 213. 

Hayden, Mary (and Marcus Hartog) : The Irish Dialect of English: Its Origins 
and Vocabulary, Fortnightly Review, April and May, 1909. 

HempI, George: Language-Rivalry and Speech-Differentiation in the Case of 
Race-Mixture, Trans. Am. Philological Assoc., vol. xxix, p. 31. 

Joyce, P. W.: English as We Speak It in Ireland, 2nd ed.; London, 1910. 

Lummis, C. F.: Borrowed From the Enemy (in The Awakening of a Nation; 
New York, 1898). 

Matthews, Brander: On the Naturalization of Foreign Words, Bookman, vol. iv, 
p. 433. 

--: What is Pure English? (in Essays on English; New York, 1921). 








BIBLIOGRAPHY 445 

Matthews, Brander: The Englishing of French Words (in Tract No. V, Society 
for Pure English; Oxford, 1921). 

Navarino, James: The Slavonic Element in English, English , March, 1921, p. 
468. 

Pound, Louise: Domestication of a Suffix (-ski), Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 304. 

-: The Jocularization of French Words and Phrases in Present-Day Ameri 

can Speech, Dialect Notes, vol. v, p. 77. 

-: Domestication of the Suffix -fest, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 353. 

Scott, Fred N.: Pronunciation of Spanish-American Words, Modem Language 
Notes, vol. vi, p. 435. 

Sproull, Wm. 0.: Hebrew and Rabbinical Words in Present Use, Eebraica, Oct., 
1890. 

Tallichet, H.: A Contribution Towards a Vocabulary of Spanish and Mexican 
Words Used in Texas, Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 185, p. 243 and p. 324. 

Vizetelly, Frank H.: The Foreign Element in English, New Age, Oct., 1913. 


5. 


PBONTTOCIATION 

Andrews, Eliza Frances: Common Sense in the Pronunciation of English, 
Chautauquan, vol. xxii, p. 595. 

Anon.: Standard Pronunciation, Journal of Education, vol. xliv, p. 48. 

Bell, Alexander Graham: The “Nasal Twang,” Modern Language Notes, vol. v, 
p. 150. 

Bridges, Robert: A Tract on the Present State of English Pronunciation; Oxford, 
1913. 

-: On English Homophones (in Tract No. II, Society for Pure English; 

Oxford, 1919). 

Burch, G. J.: The Pronunciation of English by Foreigners; Oxford, 1911. 

Crowley, Mary C.: Miss Anderson and Her “Moybid” Friend, Critic, vol. xiii, 
p. 233. 

Dunstan, A. C.: Englische Phonetik; Berlin, 1912. 

Elliott, John (and Samuel Johnson, Jr.) : A Selected Pronouncing and Accented 
Dictionary . . . ; Suffield (Conn.), 1800. 

Ellis, Alexander J.: On Early English Pronunciation, 4 vols.; London, 1869-89. 

Emerson, Oliver F.: Sweet’s Phonetics and American English, Modem Language 
Notes, vol. v, p. 404. 

Grandgent, C. H.: American Pronunciation, Le Maitre Phonetique, June, 1891, 
p. 75. 

-: American Pronunciation Again, Modem Language Notes, vol. viii, p. 273. 

-: English Sentences in American Mouths, Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 198. 

-: Fashion and the Broad A (in Old and New; Cambridge, Mass., 1920). 

-: From Franklin to Lowell: A Century of New England Pronunciation, 

Pub. Modem Language Assoc., vol. ii. 

-: Eaf and Eaef, Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 269. 

-: More Notes on American Pronunciation, Modem Language Notes, vol. vi, 

p. 458. 











446 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Grandgent, C. H.: The Dog’s Letter (in Old and New; Cambridge, Mass., 1920). 

-: Notes on American Pronunciation, Modern Language Notes, vol. vi, p. 82. 

James, Henry: The Question of Our Speech; Boston, 1905. 

Jones, Daniel: The Pronunciation of English; Cambridge, 1909. 

Koeppel, Emil: Spelling-Pronunciation: Bemerkungen iiber den Einfluss des 
Schriftbildes auf den Laut im Englischen, Quellen und Forschungen zur 
Sprach- und Culturgeschichte der Germanischen Volker, lxxxix; Strassburg, 
1901. 

Krapp, George P.: The Pronunciation of Standard English in America; New 
York, 1919. 

Lewis, Calvin L.: A Handbook of American Speech; Chicago, 1916. 

Lounsbury, Thomas It.: The Standard of Pronunciation in English; New York, 
1904. 

March, F. A.: Standard English: Its Pronunciation, Trans. Am. Philological 
Assoc., vol. xix, p. 70. 

Malone, Kemp: The A of Father, Rather, Modern Philology, vol. xvi, p. 11 
(1918). 

Matthews, Brander: A Standard of Spoken English (in Essays on English; New 
York, 1921). 

Mearns, Hughes: Our Own, Our Native Speech, McClure’s Magazine, Oct., 1916; 
reprinted, Literary Digest, Sept. 30, 1916. 

Mencken, H. L.: Spoken American, Baltimore Evening Sun, Oct. 19, 1910. 

Menger, L. E.: A Note on American Pronunciation, Le Maitre Phonetique, Dec., 
1893, p. 168. 

Menner, Robert J.: Common Sense in Pronunciation, Atlantic Monthly, Aug., 
1913. 

-: The Pronunciation of English in America, Atlantic Monthly, March, 1915. 

Montgomery, M.: Types of Standard Spoken English; Strassburg, 1910. 

Nicklin, T.: The Sounds of Standard English; Oxford, 1920. 

Palmer, H. E.: English Intonation; Cambridge (Eng.), 1922. 

-: Everyday Sentences in Spoken English; Cambridge, 1922. 

-: Grammar of Spoken English; Cambridge, 1922. 

Pound, Louise: British and American Pronunciation, School Review, June, 1915. 

Rippmann, W.: The Sounds of Spoken English; London, 1906. 

Root, E.: American and British Enunciation, Lippincott’s, Sept., 1911. 

Sargeaunt, John: The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin 
(in Tract No. IV, Society for Pure English; Oxford, 1920). 

Scott, Fred. N.: The Pronunciation of Spanish-American Words, Modern Lan¬ 
guage Notes, vol. vi. 

Smalley, D. S.: American Phonetic Dictionary of the English Language; Cin¬ 
cinnati, 1855. 

Smart, B. H.: A Practical Grammar of English Pronunciations; London, 1810. 

Stearns, Edward J.: A Practical Guide to English Pronunciation for the Use of 
Schools; Boston, 1857. 

Stratton, Clarence: Are You Uhmurican or American? New York Times, July 22, 
1917. 

-: The New Emphasis of Oral English, English Journal, Sept., 1917. 






BIBLIOGRAPHY 


447 


Sweet, Henry: A Handbook of Phonetics; London, 1877. 

-: A History of English Sounds; London, 1876; Oxford, 1888. 

-: A Primer of Spoken English; Oxford, 1900. 

-: The Sounds of English; Oxford, 1908. 

Vizetelly, Frank H.: A Desk-book of 25,000 Words Frequently Mispronounced; 
New York and London, 1917. 

Wheeler, D. H.: Our Spoken English (in By-Ways of Literature; New York, 
1883). 

White, D. S.: American Pronunciation, Journal of Eduoation, July 13, 1916. 
Wyld, H. C.: A History of Modern Colloquial English; London, 1920. 


6 . 


REGIONAL VARIATIONS 
a. General Discussions 

Bondurant, Alexander L.: Dialect in the United States, Dial, vol. xviii, p. 104. 
Carpenter, W. H.: The Philosophy of Dialect, Modem Language Notes, vol. i, 
p. 64. 

Combs, J. H.: Dialect of the Folk-Song, Dialect Notes i, vol. iv, p. 311. 
Eggleston, Edward: Folic-speech in America, Century, vol. xlviii, p. 867. 
Emerson, Oliver F.: American Dialects, Modern Language Notes, vol. xii, p. 254. 

-: The American Dialects, Providence (R. I.) Sunday Journal, Oct. 16, 1892. 

Gepp, Edward: Essex Speech in Some Dialects of the United States (in A Con¬ 
tribution to an Essex Dialect Dictionary, Supp. Ill; Colchester, 1922). 
Hempl, George: American Dialects, Modern Language Notes, vol. ix, p. 124 and 
p. 310. . 

-: Local Usage in American Speech, Dial, vol. xiv, p. 172. 

-: American Speech Maps, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 315. 

Mead, W. E.: The American Dialect Dictionary, Dialect Notes, vol. iii, p. 168. 
Sheldon, E. S.: What Is a Dialect? Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 286. 

Skeat, W. W.: English Dialects from the Eighth Century to the Present Day; 
Cambridge, 1911. 

Wright, Joseph: An English Dialect Dictionary, 6 vols.; London, 1896-1905. 

-: The English Dialect Grammar; Oxford, 1905. 

Wyld, H. C. K.: The Study of Living Popular Dialects and Its Place in the 
Modern Science of Language; London, 1904. 

b. New England 

Allen, Frederic D.: Contributions to the New England Vocabulary, Dialect 
Notes, vol. i, p. 18. 

Babbitt, E. H.: The Dialect of Western Connecticut, Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 339. 

-: List of Verbs From Western Connecticut, Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 276. 

Carr, J. W.: A Word-List From Aristook, Dialect Notes, vol. iii, p. 407. 

-: A Word-List From Eastern Maine, Dialect Notes, vol. iii, p. 239. 

-: A Word-List From Hampstead, N. H., Dialect Notes, vol. iii, p. 179. 

Chase, George Davis: Cape Cod Dialect, Dialect Notes, vol. ii, p. 289 and p. 433; 
vol. iii, p. 419. 













448 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Choate, I. B.: New England Notes, Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 213. 

Daniell, M. Grant: New England Notes, Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 213. 

England, George Allan: Rural Locutions of Maine and Northern New Hampshire, 
Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 67. 

Ernst, C. W.: Words Coined in Boston, New England Magazine, vol. xv, p. 337. 

Grandgent, C. H.: New England Pronunciation (in Old and New; Cambridge, 
Mass., 1920). 

-: From Franklin to Lowell: a Century of New England Pronunciation, Pub. 

Modem Language Assoc., vol. ii. 

Griffis, William Elliott: The Dutch Influence in New England, Harper's Maga¬ 
zine, vol. lxxxviii, p. 213. 

Leonard, Arthur N.: Lists From Maine, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 1. 

Macy, William F. (and Roland B. Hussey) : Nantucket Word-List, Dialect Notes, 
vol. iv, p. 332. 

Mead, William E. (and George D. Chase) : A Central Connecticut Word-List, 
Dialect Notes, vol. iii, p. 1. 

Rees, Byron: Word-List From Chilmark, Martha’s Vineyard, 1917, Dialect Notes, 
vol. v, p. 15. 

Sheldon, E. S.: A New Englander’s English and the English of London, Dialect 
Notes, vol. i, p. 33. 

-: The New England Pronunciation of 0, Proc. Am. Philological Assoc, for 

1883, p. xix. 

Wadleigh, Frances E.: New England Dialect, Boston Evening Transcript, March 
8, 1893. 


o. The Middle States 

Allen, W. H.: Pennsylvania Word-List, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 157. 

Babbitt, E. H.: The English of the Lower Classes in New York City and Vicinity, 
Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 457. 

Bowen, B. L.: A Word-List From Western New York, Dialect Notes, vol. iii, 
p. 435. 

Child, Clarence Griffin: The Diphthong oi in New England, Modem Language 
Notes, vol. xv, p. 123. 

Crowley, Mary C.: Miss Anderson and Her “Moybid” Friend, Critic, vol. xiii, 
p. 233. 

Emerson, Oliver F.: The Ithaca Dialect, Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 85. 

Grumbine, Lee L.: Provincialisms of the “Dutch” Districts of Pennsylvania, 
Proc. Am. Philological Assoc, for 1886, p. xii. 

Heydrick, B. A.: Pennsylvania Word-List, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 337. 

Lee, Francis B.: Jerseyisms, Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 327. 

-: Jerseyisms; Trenton, 18S9. 

Ralph, Julian: The Language of the Tenement Folk, Harper's Weekly, vol. xli, 
p. 90. 

White, Henry Adelbert: A Word-List From Central New York, Dialect Notes, 
vol. iii, p. 565. 

Zimmermann, H. E.: Maryland Word-List, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 343. 





BIBLIOGRAPHY 


449 


d. The South 

Allen, F. Sturges: Florida Word-List, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 344. 

Andrews, Eliza Frances: Cracker English, Chautauquan, vol. xxiii, p. 85. 

Bolton, Henry Carrington: The Pronunciation of Folk-Names in South Carolina, 
Jour. Am. Folk-Lore, vol. iv, p. 270. 

Bourke, Henry M.: Language and Folk Usage of the Rio Grande Valley, Jour. 
Am. Folk-Lore, vol. ix, p. 81. 

Brown, Calvin S., Jr.: Dialectical Survivals in Tennessee, Modern Language 
Notes, vol. iv, p. 409. 

-: Other Dialectical Forms in Tennessee, Pub. Modern Language Assoc., vol. 

vi, p. 171. 

-: Tennessee Word-List, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 345. 

Carr, J. W.: A List of Words from Northwest Arkansas, Dialect Notes, vol. ii, 
p. 416; vol. iii, p. 68 and p. 124; vol. iii, p. 205 and p. 392. 

Combs, J. H.: A Word List From the South, Dialect Notes, vol. v, p. 31. 

-: Old, Early and Elizabethan English in the Southern Mountains, Dialect 

Notes, vol. iv, p. 283. 

Crow, C. L.: Texas Word-List, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 347. 

Crumb, D. S.: The Dialect of Southeastern Missouri, Dialect Notes, vol. ii, p. 304. 

Dingus, L. R.: A Word-List From Virginia, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 177. 

Edson, H. A. (and others) : Tennessee Mountain Word-List, Dialect Notes, vol. 
i, p. 370. 

Fruit, John P.: Kentucky Words, Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 229. 

-: Kentucky Words and Phrases, Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 63. 

Green, B. W.: Word-hook of Virginia Folk-speech; Richmond, 1899. 

Hancock, Elizabeth H.: Southern Speech, Neale’s Monthly, Nov., 1913. 

Kephart, Horace: The Mountain Dialect (in Our Southern Highlanders; New 
York, 1913). 

-: A Word-List From the Mountains of Western North Carolina, Dialect 

Notes, vol. iv, p. 407. 

Lang, Henry R.: Zu den Charleston Provincialisms, Phonetische Studien, vol. ii, 
p. 185. 

Lloyd, John Uri: The Language of the Kentucky Negro, Dialect Notes, vol. ii, 
p. 179. 

Man, A. P., Jr.: Virginia Word-List, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 158. 

Morley, Margaret W.: The Speech of the Mountains (in The Carolina Mountains; 
Boston, 1913). 

Payne, L. W., Jr.: A Word-List From East Alabama, Dialect Notes, vol. iii, p. 
279. 

-: A Word-List From Alabama; Austin (Texas), 1909. 

Pearce, J. W.: Notes From Louisiana, Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 69. 

Primer, Sylvester: Charleston Provincialisms, Phonetische Studien, vol. i, p. 227. 

_ : Dialectical Studies in West Virginia, Colorado College Studies for 1891. 

_ : The Huguenot Element in Charleston’s Provincialisms, Phonetische 

Studien, vol. iii, p. 139. 

-: The Pronunciation of Fredericksburg, Va., Pub. Modem Language Assoc., 

vol. v, p. 185. 










450 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Primer, Sylvester: The Pronunciation Near Fredericksburg, Va., Proc. Am. 
Philological Assoc, for 1889, p. xxv. 

Read, William A.: The Southern R, Louisiana, State University Bulletin, Feb., 
1910. 

-: Some Variant Pronunciations in the New South, Dialect Notes, vol. iii, 

p. 497. 

-: Vowel System of the Southern United States, Englische Studien, vol. 

xli, p. 70. 

Riedel, E.: New Orleans Word-List, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 268. 

Rollins, Hyder E.: A W'est Texas Word-List, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 224. 

Routh, James: Louisiana Word-List, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 346. 

- (and others) : Terms From Louisiana, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 420. 

Shands, H. A.: Some Peculiarities of Speech in Mississippi; n. p., 1893. 

Shearin, Hubert G.: An Eastern Kentucky Dialect Word-List, Dialect Notes, 
vol. iii, p. 537. 

Sherwood, Adiel: Southern Glossary (in Gazetteer of Georgia; Charleston, 1827). 

Smith, C. Alphonso: You All as Used in the South, Uncle Remus’s Magazine, 
July, 1907. 

Smith, Charles Forster: On Southernisms, Trans. Am. Philological Assoc., vol. 
xiv, p. 42; vol. xvii, p. 34. 

-: Southern Dialect in Life and Literature, Southern Bivouac, Nov., 1885. 

Southern, A.: The Vowel System of the Southern United States, Englische 
Studien, vol. xli. 

Steadman, J. M., Jr.: A North Carolina Word-List, Dialect Notes, vol. v, p. 18. 

Tallichet, H.: A Contribution Towards a Vocabulary of Spanish and Mexican 
Words Used in Texas, Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 185, p. 243. 

Weeks, Abigail E.: A Word-List From Barbourville, Ky., Dialect Notes, vol. iii, 
p. 456. 


e. The Middle West 

Brown, Rollo Walter: A Word-List From Western Indiana, Dialect Notes, vol. 
iii, p. 570. 

Carruth, W. H.: Dialect Word List (of Kansas), Kansas University Quarterly, 
vol. i, p. 95 and p. 133; vol. vi, p. 51 and p. 85. 

G. D. C.: Russian Words in Kansas, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 161. 

Hanley, O. W.: Dialect Words From Southern Indiana, Dialect Notes, vol. ii, 
p. 113. 

Hart, J. M. (and others) : Notes from Cincinnati, Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 60. 

Kenyon, John S.: Western Reserve Word-List, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 386. 

Parry, W. H.: Dialect Peculiarities in Southeastern Ohio, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, 
p. 339. 

Pound, Louise: A Second Word-List From Nebraska, Dialect Notes, vol. iii, 
p. 541; vol. iv, p. 271. 

-: Dialect Speech in Nebraska, Dialect Notes, vol. iii, p. 55. 

Rice, William O.: The Pioneer Dialect of Southern Illinois, Dialect Notes, vol. 
ii, p. 225. 







BIBLIOGRAPHY 


451 


Ruppenth J, J. C.: A Word-List From Kansas, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 101 and 
p. 319. 

Weeks, R. L.: Notes From Missouri, Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 235. 

/. The Far West 

Bruner, Helen (and Frances Francis): A Short Word-List From Wyoming, 
Dialect Notes, vol. iii, p. 550. 

Chapin, Florence A.: Spanish Words That Have Become Westernisms, Editor, 
July 25, 1917. 

Garrett, R. M.: A Word-List From the Northwest, Dialect Notes, vol. v, p. 54 
and p. 80. 

Harvey,.Bartlett: A Word-List From the Northwest, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 26 
and p. 162. 

Hayden, Marie Gladys: A Word-List From Montana, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 243. 

Lehman, Benjamin H.: A Word-List From the Northwestern United States, 
Dialect Notes, vol. v, p. 22. 

McLean, John: Western Americanisms (in The Indians: Their Manners and 
Customs; Toronto, 1889). 

Man, A. P., Jr.:' Arizona Word-List, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 164. 

g. The Colonies 

Dunlap, Maurice P.: What Americans Talk in the Philippines, American Revieic 
of Reviews, Aug., 1913. 


h. Negro-English 

Fruit, J. P. (and C. H. Grandgent) : Uncle Remus in Phonetic Spelling, Dialed 
Notes, vol. iv, p. 196. 

Grade, P.: Das Neger-Englisch, Anglia, vol. xiv, p. 362. 

Harrison, James A.: Negro-English, Modem Language Notes, vol. vii, p. 123. 

-: Negro English, Proc. American Philological Association, 1885. 

Lloyd, John Uri: The Language of the Kentucky Negro, Dialect Notes, vol. ii, 
p. 179. 

Thom, William Taylor: Some Parallelisms Between Shakespeare’s English and 
the Negro-English of the United States, Shakespeariana, vol. i, p. 129. 


7. 


SPELLING 

Allen, F. Sturges: Principles of Spelling Reform; New York, 1907. 

Anderson, William W.: The Craze for Wrong Spelling, Dial, vol. xix, p. 173. 
Anon.: Another Spelling Standard, Journal of Education, vol. xlii, p. 436. 

-: English Spelling and the Movement to Improve It (Part 1 of Handbook 

of Simplified Spelling, Simplified Spelling Board) ; New York, 1919. 

-: The Case for Simplified Spelling (Part 2 of Handbook of Simplified Spell¬ 
ing, Simplified Spelling Board) ; New York, 1920. 

Anon.: Rules and Dictionary List (Part 3 of Handbook of Simplified Spelling, 
Simplified Spelling Board); New York, n. d. 






452 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Anon.: Rules for Simplified Spelling Adopted by the Simplified Spelling Board; 
New York, 1919. 

--: The Future of English Spelling, Dial, vol. xxi, p. 273. 

-: Revised Spellings, Educational Review, vol. xvi, p. 402. 

-: Suggestions to Medical Authors: American Medical Association Style 

Book; Chicago, 1919. 

Ayres, Leonard P.: The Spelling Vocabularies of Personal and Business Letters 
(Circular E126, Division of Education, Russell Sage Foundation) ; New 
York, n. d. 

Benton, Joel: The Webster Spelling-Book, . . . Magazine of American History, 
Oct., 1883. 

Century Magazine: Style-sheet; New York, 1915. 

Chicago Daily News: Style-book . . . ; Chicago, 1908. 

Chicago, University of: Manual of Style . . . 3rd ed.; Chicago, 1911. 

Cobb, Lyman: A Critical Review of the Orthography of Dr. Webster’s Series of 
Books . . . ; New York, 1831. 

-: New Spelling Book . . . ; New York, 1842. 

Collins, F. Howard: Authors’ & Printers’ Dictionary, 4th ed., rev. by Horace 
Hart; London, 1912. 

Cushing, J. S. Company: Preparation of Manuscript, Proof Reading, and Office 
Style at J. S. Cushing Company’s; Norwood (Mass.), n. d. 

Drummond, H.: Simplified Spelling, English , March, 1920, p. 315. 

-: Spelling Reform Forty Years Ago, English, June, 1920, p. 375. 

Ellis, Alexander: On Glosik, a Neu Sistem ov Inglish Spelling; London, 1870. 

Fernald, F. A.: Ingglish az She iz Spelt; New York, 1885. 

Ford, Henry A.: The Capitalization of English Words, Journal of Education, 
vol. xli, p. 104. 

Fowler, H. W.: Hyphens (in Tract No. VI, Society for'Pure English; Oxford, 
1921). 

Franklin, Benjamin: Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of 
Spelling; Phila., 1768. 

Funk & Wagnalls Company: Style-card; New York, 1914. 

Gladstone, J. H.: Spelling Reform; London, 1878. 

Grattan, J. H. G.: “Peetickay,” English, Oct., 1920, p. 408. 

Hart, Horace: Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, 
Oxford; 23rd ed.; London, 1914. 

Ives, George B.: Text, Type and Style: a Compendium of Atlantic Usage; Boston, 
1921. 

Johnson, Samuel, Jr.: A School Dictionary . . . ; New Haven (1798?). 

Lounsbury, Thomas R.: English Spelling and Spelling Reform; New York, 1909. 

Macmillan Co.: Notes for the Guidance of Authors; New York, 1918. 

March, Francis A.: Spelling Reform; Washington, 1893. 

Matthews, Brander: American Spelling, Harper’s Magazine, vol. lxxxv, p. 277. 

Mencken, H. L.: The Curse of Spelling, New York Evening Mail, April 11, 1918. 

Muller, Max: Spelling, Fortnightly Review, April, 1876. 







BIBLIOGRAPHY 


453 


Payne, James E. (and others) : Style Book: a Compilation of Rules Governing 
Executive, Congressional and Departmental Printing, Including the Con¬ 
gressional Record; Washington, 1917. 

Peck, Harry Thurston: The Collapse of Simplified Spelling, Bookman, vol. xxiv, 
p. 459. 

-: The Progress of “Fonetic Refawrm,” Bookman, vol. vi, p. 196. 

Perrett, Wilfrid: Peetickay: an Essay Toward the Abolition of Spelling; Cam¬ 
bridge (England), 1920. 

Riverside Press: Handbook of Style in Use at the Riverside Press, Cambridge, 
Mass.; Boston and New York, 1913. 

Skeat, W. W.: Modern English Spelling, National Review, vol. xlviii, p. 301. 

-: On the History of Spelling; London, 1908. 

Smith, Benjamin E.: The Future of Spelling Reform, Forum, vol. xxii, p. 367. 
Smith, Logan Pearsall: A Few Practical Suggestions (in Tract No. Ill, Society 
for Pure English; Oxford, 1920). 

Talman, Charles Fitzhugh: Accents Wild, Atlantic Monthly, Dec., 1915. 

Vaile, E. 0.: Our Accursed Spelling; Oak Park, Ill., 1901. 

Webster, Noah: An American Dictionary of the English Language ... 2 vols.; 
New York, 1828. 

-: The American Spelling Book . . . Being the First Part of a Grammatical 

Institute of the English Language . . . ; Boston, 1783. 

-: The American Spelling Book . . .• revised ed.; Sandbornton (N. H.), 

1835. 

-: A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language; Hartford, 1806. 

-: A Dictionary of the English Language Compiled for the Use of Common 

Schools in the .United States; Boston, 1807. 

-: A Dictionary of the English Language . . . for Common Schools . . . ; 

Hartford, 1817. 

-: Dissertations on the English Language . . . ; Boston, 1789. 

-: The Elementary Spelling Book . . . ; Phila., 1829. 

-: The Elementary Spelling Book . . . revised ed.; New York, 1848. 

-: A Grammatical Institute of the English Language ... in Three Parts; 

Hartford, 1783. 

-: A Letter to the Hon. John Pickering on the Subject of His Vocabulary; 

Boston, 1817. 

-: The New American Spelling Book . . . ; New Haven, 1833. 


8 . 


GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES 

Ackerman, William K.: Origin of Names of Stations on the Illinois Central 
Railroad (in Early Illinois Railroads; Chicago, 1884). 

Ames, Evelyn: English Place-Names in English Speech, English, Nov., 1920, 
p. 422. 

Anon.: A History of the Origin of the Place-Names in Nine Northwestern States; 
Chicago, 1908. 

-: Nicknames of the States, Current Literature, vol. xxiv, p. 41. 

















454 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Baker, Marcus: Alaskan Geographic Names; Washington, 1900. 

Battle, Kemp P.: The Names of the Counties of North Carolina; Winston, N. C., 
1888. 

Beauchamp, Wm. M.: Aboriginal Place-Names of New York; Albany, 1907. 

-: Indian Names in New York; Fayetteville (N. Y.), 1893. 

Beckwith, H. W.: Indian Names of Water-Courses in the State of Indiana (in 
Annual Report of the Indiana Dept, of Geology and Natural History; 
Indianapolis, 1883). 

Berger, V.: Amerikanska Ortnamn af Svenskt Ursprung; n. p., n. d. 

Bonnell, J. W.: Etymological Derivation of the Names of the States, Journal 
of Education, vol. xlvii, p. 378. 

Boyd, Stephen G.: Indian Local Names; York (Pa.), 1885. 

Brainerd, E.: The Significance of Some Familiar Names of Persons and Places, 
Education, vol. xix, p. 140. 

Branner, John Casper: Some Old French Place-Names in the State of Arkansas, 
Modem Language Notes, vol. xiv, p. 65. 

Carstenn, Edward: Was die Danziger Strassennamen Erzahlen; Dantzig, 1922. 

Clarke, James Freeman: On Giving Names to Towns and Streets; Boston, 1880. 

Cowan, John F.: The Origin of Familiar Names, Education, vol. xix, p. 640. 

Coxe, A. C.: American Geographical Names, Forum, vol. iv, p. 67. 

Davis, William T.: Staten Island Names; New Brighton, N. Y., 1896. 

Douglas-Lithgow, R. A.: Dictionary of American Indian Place an'd Proper Names 
in New England; Salem (Mass.), 1909. 

Drake, C. M.: California Names and Their Literal Meanings; Los Angeles, 1893. 

Egli, Johann J.: Nomina Geographica, 2nd ed.; Zurich, 1893. 

-: Der Vdlkergeist in den geographischen Namen; Zurich, 1894. 

Feipel, Louis N.: The Lure of American Place-Names (unpublished). 

Field, David Dudley: Nomenclature of Cities and Towns in the United States; 
New York, 1885. 

Fulmore, Z. T.: The History and Geography of Texas as Told in County Names; 
Austin, Tex., 1915. 

Gannett, Henry: The Origin of Certain Place-Names in the United States, 2nd 
ed.; Washington, 1905. 

Ganzemiiller, Konrad: Definitions of Geographical Names; New York, 1894. 

Greenleaf, Moses: Indian Place-Names; Bangor, Me., 1903. 

Hagner, Alexander B.: Street Nomenclature of Washington City, Records Colum¬ 
bia Historical Society, vol. vii, p. 237. 

Haywood, Edward F.: The Names of New England Places, New England Magcu- 
zine, new series, vol. xiii, p. 345. 

Hempl, George: The Stress of German and English Compound Geographical 
Names, Modern Language Notes, vol. xi, p. 232. 

Horsford, Eben N.: The Indian Names of Boston; Cambridge, Mass., 1886. 

Hubbard, Lucius L.: Some Indian Place-Names and Their Meanings (in Woods 
and Lakes of Maine; Boston, 1884). 

Kellogg, Louise Phelps: Organization, Boundaries and Names of Wisconsin 
Counties, Proo. State Historical Society of Wisconsin for 1909, p. 184. 

Kelton, Dwight H.: Indian Names of Places Near the Great Lakes; Detroit, 1888. 




BIBLIOGRAPHY 


455 


Ker, Edmund T.: River and Lake Names in the United States; New York, 1911. 

Kinnicutt, Lincoln N.: Indian Names of Places in . . . Massachusetts; Worces¬ 
ter, Mass., 1909. 

Knox, Alexander: Glossary of Geographical and Topographical Terms; London, 
1904. 

Kroeber, A. L.: California Place-Names of Indian Origin; Berkeley, Calif., 1916. 

Lange, F. W. T.: Geographical Names, English, Feb., 1920, p. 287. 

Legler, Henry E.: Origin and Meaning of Wisconsin Place-Names; Madison, Wis., 
1903. 

Long, Charles M.: Virginia County Names; New York, 1908. 

McAdoo, W. G.: American Geographical Nomenclature; Milledgeville, Ga., 1871. 

Martin, Maria Ewing: Origin of Ohio Place-Names, Ohio Archceological and His¬ 
torical Quarterly, vol. xiv, p. 272. 

Meany, Edmond S.: Indian Geographic Names of Washington; Seattle, 1908. 

Mooney, James, ed.: Geographic Nomenclature of the District of Columbia, 
American Anthropologist, Jan., 1893. 

Moreno, H. M.: Dictionary of Spanish-Named California Cities and Towns; 
Chicago, 1916. 

Olaguibel, Manuel de: Onomatologia del Estaso de Mexico; Roluca (Mexico), 
1893. 

Parsons, Usher: Indian Names of Places in Rhode Island; Providence, R. I., 1861. 

Pefiafiel, Antonio: Nombres Geograficos de Mexico; Mexico, 1885. 

Perkins, Franklin: Geographical Names, Journal of Education, vol. xlv, p. 367 
and p. 403. 

Renault, Raoul: Some Old French Place-Names in the State of Arkansas, Modern 
Language Notes, vol. xiv, p. 191. 

Rouillard, Eugene: Noms Geographiques de la Province de Quebec et des Pro¬ 
vinces Maritimes; Quebec, 1906. 

Salverte, Eusebe: History of the Names of Men, Nations and Places, tr. by L. H. 
Mordacque, 2 vols.; London, 1862-4. 

Sanchez, Nellie van de Grift: Spanish and Indian Place-Names of California; 
San Francisco, 1914. 

Skinner, Charles M.: Some Odd Names of Places Across the Border, Current 
Literature, vol. xxv, p. 41. 

Spofford, A. R.: American Historical Nomenclature; Washington, 1894. 

Staples, H. B.: Origin of the Names of the States of the Union; Worcester, 
(Mass.), 1882. 

Thomas, George Francis: The Meaning and Derivation of Names of Rivers, 
Lakes, Towns, etc., of the Northwest (in Legends of the Land of Lakes; 
Chicago, 1884). 

Tooker, William W.: Indian Names of Places in the Borough of Brooklyn; New 
York, 1901. 

-: The Indian Names for Long Island; New York, 1901. 

-: The Indian Place-Names on Long Island; New York, 1911. 

Trumbull, J. Hammond: The Composition of Indian Geographical Names, Col¬ 
lection of the Conn. Historical Society, vol. ii. 




456 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Trumbull, J. Ha mm ond: Indian Names of Places, etc., in and on the Borders 
of Connecticut; Hartford, 1881. 

Upbam, Warren: Minnesota Geographical Names; St. Paul, Minn., 1920. 

U. S. Geographic Board: Fourth Report, 1890 to 1916; Washington, 1916. 

■-: Fifth Report, 1890 to 1920; Washington, 1921. 

-: Correct Orthography of Geographic Names, rev. to Jan., 1911; Washing¬ 
ton, 1911. 

U. S. Geographic Board: Decisions of the Board; Washington, v. d. 

White, James: Place-Names in the Thousand Islands; Ottawa, 1910. 

Whitmore, William Henry: An Essay on the Origin of the Names of Towns in 
Massachusetts; Boston, 1873. 


9. 


SURNAMES AND GIVEN NAMES 

Anjou, Gustave: List of Dutch and Frisian Baptismal Names With Their English 
Equivalents (in Ulster County, N. Y., Probate Records; New York, 1906). 

Anon.: A List of Christian Names, Their Derivatives, Nicknames and Equivalents 
in Several Foreign Languages, For Use in the Adjutant General’s Office, 
War Department; Washington, 1920. 

-: Guide to Similar Surnames, For Use in the Adjutant General’s Office, 

War Department; Washington, 1920. 

-: List of Persons W’hose Names Have Been Changed in Massachusetts, 1780- 

1892; Boston, 1893. 

Arthur, William: An Etymological Dictionary of Family and Christian Names; 
New York, 1857. 

Bardsley, Charles W.: Curiosities of Puritan Nomenclature; London, 1880. 

Baring-Gould, S.: Family Names and Their Story; London, 1910. 

Barker, Henry: British Family Names; London, 1894. 

Bradley, Charles William: Patronomatology; Baltimore, 1842. 

Burnham, Sarah Maria: Our Names: Their Origin and Significance; Boston, 
1900. 

Charnock, Richard S.: Prgenomina; London, 1882. 

Crane, W. W.: Our Naturalized Names, Lippincott’s Magazine, vol. lxiii, p. 575. 

Daniel, James Walter: A Ramble Among Surnames; Nashville, Tenn., 1893. 

Dixon, B. Homer: Surnames; Boston, 1855. 

Dubbs, Joseph H.: A Study of Surnames; Lancaster (Pa.), 1886. 

Dunlap, Fayette: A Tragedy of Surnames, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. i, 1913. 

Ferguson, Robert: English Surnames; London, 1858. 

-: Surnames as a Science; London, 1883. 

Fernow, Berthold: New Amsterdam Family Names and Their Origin; New York, 
1898. 

Flom, George F.: Norwegian Surnames, Scandinavian Studies and Notes, vol. v, 
p. 139. 

Gardner, J. E.: List of Chinese Family Names; Washington, 1909. 

Gentry, Thomas G.: Family Names of the Irish, Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman and 
Scotch; Phila., 1892. 







BIBLIOGRAPHY 


457 


Harrison, Henry: A Dictionary of the Surnames of the United Kingdom; London, 
1912. 

Hill, Geoffry: Christian Names in England (in Some Consequences of the Nor¬ 
man Conquest; London, 1904). 

Howell, George Rogers: The Origin and Meaning of English and Dutch Surnames 
of New York State Families; Albany, 1894. 

Ingraham, E. D.: Singular Surnames; Phila., 1873. 

Inman, Thomas: On the Origin of Certain Christian and Other Names; Liverpool, 
1866. 

Jones, David D.: The Surnames of the Chinese in America; San Francisco, 1904. 

Judson, Amos M.: A Grammar of American Surnames; Washington, 1898. 

King, Marquis Fayette: Changes in Names By Special Acts of the Legislature of 
Maine, 1820-1895; Portland, Me., 1901. 

Kuhns, L. Oscar: The Origin of Pennsylvania Surnames, Lippincott's Magazine , 
vol. lix, p. 395, March, 1897. 

-: Studies in Pennsylvania German Family Names; New York, 1902. 

Latham, Edward: A Dictionary of Names, Nicknames and Surnames; London, 
1904. 

Lower, M. A.: Patronymica Britannica; London, 1860. 

McKenna, L. B.: Surnames, Their Origin and Nationality; Quincy (Ill.), 1913. 

Oliphant, Samuel Grant: The Clan of Fire and Forge, or, The Ancient and 
Honorable Smiths; Olivet (Mich.), 1910. 

-: Surnames in Baltimore, Baltimore Sunday Sun, 62 weekly articles, Dec. 

2, 1906-Jan. 26, 1908, inc.; index, Feb. 2, 9, 16, 23, 1908. 

Pearson, T. R.: The Origin of Surnames, Good Words, June, 1897. 

Pulvermacher, N.: Berliner Vornamen; Berlin, 1902. 

Quigley, Hugh: A Vocabulary of Ancient and Modern Irish Family Names (in 
The Irish Race in California; San Francisco, 1878). 

Rupp, Israel D.: A Collection of . . . Names of German, Swiss, Dutch, French 
and Other Immigrants in Pennsylvania from 1727 to 1776, 2nd rev. ed.; 
Phila., 1876. 

-: General Remarks on the Origin of Surnames; Harrisburg, Pa., 1856. 

Saurusaitis, Peter: List of Lithuanian Family Names; Shenandoah, Pa., 1908. 

Scheie de Vere, Maximilian: A Few Virginia Names, Modem Language Notes, 
vol. ii, p. 145 and p. 193. 

Searle, William G.: Onomasticon Anglo-Saxonicum; Cambridge, 1897. 

Tolman, A. H.: English Surnames (in The Views About Hamlet; Boston, 1904). 

Weekley, Ernest: Surnames; London, 1916. 

10 . 

NON-ENGLISH LANGUAGES IN AMERICA 
a. German 

Aurand, Ammon M.: Aurand’s Collection of Pennsylvania German Stories and 
Poems; Beaver Springs, Pa., 1916. 

Beidelman, William: The Story of the Pennsylvania Germans, . . . Their Origin, 
Their History and Their Dialect; Easton, Pa., 1898. 





458 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Bonneheur, Armin de: Pennsylvania Dutch, 'Nation, vol. lxvii, p. 482. 

Faust, A. B.: Non-English Writings: I. German (in Cambridge History of 
American Literature, vol. iv, p. 572; New York, 1921). 

Fischer, H. L.: Kurzwell and Zeitfertreib; York, Pa., 1882. 

Fogel, Edwin Miller: Beliefs and Superstitions of the Pennsylvania Germans; 
Philadelphia, 1915. 

Fuchs, Meik, pseud.: Dreiguds un Noschens; Milwaukee, 1898. 

Haldeman, S. S.: Pennsylvania Dutch . . . ; Phila., 1872. 

Harbaugh, H.: Harbaugh’s Harfe, rev. ed.; Phila., 1902. 

Hays, H. M.: On the German Dialect Spoken in the Valley of Virginia, Dialect 
Notes, vol. iii, p. 263. 

Horne, Abraham R.: Horne’s Pennsylvania German Manual, 3rd ed.; Allentown, 
Pa., 1905. 

Learned, M. D.: Application of the Phonetic System of the American Dialect 
Society to Pennsylvania German, Modem Language Notes, vol. v, p. 237. 

-: The Pennsylvania German Dialect, Part I; Baltimore, 1889. 

Lins, James C.: Common Sense Pennsylvania German Dictionary; Reading, Pa., 
1895. 

Miller, Daniel: Pennsylvania German, 2 vols.; Reading, Pa., 1903-11. 

Miller, Harvey M.: Pennsylvania-German Stories, Prose and Poetry; Elizabeth- 
ville, Pa., 1911. 

Pelz, Eduard: Die Deutsche Sprache Gegeniiber dem Englischen, Besonders in 
Nord-Amerika; Leipzig and New York, 1855. 

Pennsylvania-German, Jan., 1900—. (Quarterly, 1903-05; bimonthly, Jan.-July, 
1906; monthly, Sept., 1906—. Edited by P. C. Croll, H. A. Schuler, H. W. 
Kriebel, at Lebanon, East Greenville, Lititz, Cleona, Pa.) 

Rauch, E.: Rauch’s Pennsylvania Dutch Hand-Book; Mauch Chunk, Pa., 1879. 

Stein, Thomas S.: ’Uf’m Oewerste Speicher; Annville, Pa., 1900. 

Stoudt, John Baer: The Folklore of the Pennsylvania-German; Lancaster, Pa., 
1915. 

Wollenweber, L. A.: Gemalde aus dem Pennsylvanischen Volksleben; Phila., 
1869. 

Womer, William A.: Physician’s German Interpreter; n. p., 1904. 

6. French 

Barbier, Paul: English Influence on the French Vocabulary (in Tract No. VII, 
Society for Pure English; Oxford, 1921). 

Bibaud, Maximilien: Le Memorial des Vicissitudes et des Progres de la Langue 
Frangaise en Canada; Montreal, 1879. 

Bonny, H. P.: Anglicisms in Lower Canadian French, Jour. <md Proo. Hamilton 
Assoc, for 1891, p. 101. 

Brandon, Edgar Z.: A French Colony in Michigan, Modem Language Notes, vol. 
xiii, p. 242. 

Buies, Arthur: Anglicismes et Canadianismes; Quebec, 1888. 

Caron, M. N.: Petit Vocabulaire a l’Usage des Canadiens Frangais; Trois- 
Rivieres, 1880. 

Chamberlain, A. F.: Bibliography of the Franco-Canadian Dialect, Dialect Notes, 
vol. i, p. 53. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 


459 


Chamberlain, A. F.: Dialect Research in Canada, Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 43. 

-: Notes on the Canadian French Dialect of Granby, P. Q., Modem Language 

Notes, vol. vii, p. 12; vol. viii, p. 16. 

-: The Life and Growth of Words in the French Dialect of Quebec, Modem 

Language Notes^ vol. ix, p. 78 and p. 135. 

Clapin, Sylva: Dictionnaire Canadien-Frangais; Montreal, 1894. 

Dionne, N. E.: Le Parler Populaire des Canadiens-Frangais; Quebec, 1909. 

Dunn, Oscar: Glossaire Franco-Canadien et Vocabulaire de Locutions Vicieuses 
Usit4es au Canada; Quebec, 1880. 

Elliott, A. M.: Contributions to a History of the French Language of Canada, 
Am. Jour, of Philology, vol. vi, p. 135; vol. vii, p. 141; vol. viii, p. 135 and 
p. 338; vol. x, p. 133. 

Fortier, Alcee: Acadians of Louisiana and Their Dialect; New Orleans, 1891. 

-: French Language in Louisiana and the Negro French Dialect; New Or¬ 
leans, n. d. 

-: Louisiana Studies; New Orleans, 1894. 

-: Louisiana Folk-Tales, in French Dialect and English Translation; Boston, 

1895. 

Fortier, Edward J.: Non-English Writings: II. French (in Cambridge History 
of American Literature, vol. iv, p. 590; New York, 1921). 

Geddes, James, Jr.: Canadian-French, 1890-1900, Kritisclier Jahresbericht iiber 
die Fortschritte der Romanischen Philologie, bd. v, p. 294; bd. vi, p. 408; 
bd. viii, p. 217. 

-: Comparison of Two Acadian French Dialects Spoken in the Northeast of 

North America With the Franco-Canadian Dialect Spoken at Ste. Anne de 
Beaupre, Province of Quebec, Modem Language Notes, vol. viii, p. 449; 
vol. ix, p. 1 and p. 99. 

-: Study of an Acadian-French Dialect Spoken on the North Shore of the 

Baie-des-Chaleurs; Halle, 1908. 

Harrison, J. A.: The Creole Patois of Louisiana, Am. Jour. Philology, vol. iii, 
p. 285. 

Lacasse, R. P. Z.: Ces Jeunes-la on ne les Comprend Plus (in Une Mine Pro- 
duisant l’Or et l’Argent; Quebec, 1880, pp. 252-6). 

Legendre, Napoleon: La Langue Que Nous Parlons, Memoires et Comptes-Rcndus 
de la Societe Royale de Canada for 1887, p. 129. 

-: La Langue Frangaise au Canada; Quebec, 1890. 

Montigny, Louvigny de: La Langue Frangaise au Canada; Ottawa, 1916. 

Northrup, Clark S.: A Bibliography of the English and French Languages in 
America From 1894 to 1900, Dialect Notes, vol. ii, p. 151. 

Reveillaud, Eugene: La Langue et la Litterature Frangaises au Canada, Revue 
Suisse, Aug., 1883, p. 311. 

Rivard, Adjutor: £tude sur les Parlers de France au Canada; Quebec, 1914. 

Schuchardt, H.: Beitriige zur Kenntniss des Englischen Kreolisch, Englische 
Studien, vol. xii, p. 470; vol. xiii, p. 158; vol. xv, p. 286. 

Sheldon, E. S.: Some Specimens of a French-Canadian Dialect Spoken in Maine, 
Trans. Modern Language Assoc., vol. iii, p. 210. 










460 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Squair, John: A Contribution to the Study of the Franco-Canadian Dialect, 
Proc. Canadian Institute , series iii, vol. vi, p. 161. 

Tardivel, J. P.: L’Anglicisme: Voila l’Ennemi; Quebec, 1880. 

-: La Langue Frangaise au Canada; Montreal, 1901. 

o. D ano- N orwegia n 

Flaten, Nils: Notes on American-Norwegian, With a Vocabulary, Dialect Notes, 
vol. ii, p. 115. 

Flom, George T.: A Grammar of the Song Dialect of Norwegian, Dialect Notes, 
vol. iii, p. 25. 

-: English Elements in Norse Dialects of Utica, Wisconsin, Dialect Notes, 

vol. ii, p. 257. 

d. Dutch 

Nieland, Dirk: Yankec-Dutch; Grand Rapids, Mich., 1919. 

Prince, J. Dyneley: The Jersey Dutch Dialect, Dialect Notes, vol. iii, p. 459. 

e. Swedish 

Berger, V.: Vart Spr&k; Rock Island, Ill., 1912. 

/. Spanish 

Abeille, Luciano: El Idioma Nacional de los Argentinos; Paris, 1900. 

Armengal y Valenzuela, P.: Glossario Etimologico de Nombres de Hombres, 
Animales, Plantas, Rios y Lugares, y de Vocablos Incorporados en el 
Lenguaje Vulgar; Aborlgenes de Chile y de Algfin Otro Pais Americano; 
Santiago de Chile, vol. i, 1918; vol. ii, 1919. 

Arona, Juan de: Diccionario de Peruanismos; Lima, 1882. 

Batres y Jauregni, Antonio: Vicios del Lenguaje y Provincialismos de Guate¬ 
mala; Guatemala, 1892. 

Bayo, Ciro: Vocabulario Criollo-Espafiol Sud-Americano; Madrid, 1910. 

-: Vocabulario de Provincialismos Argentinos y Bolivianos, Rev. Hispanique, 

vol. xiv, p. 241. 

Blanco-Fombona, R.: Letras y Letrados de Hispano-America; Paris, 1908. 

Buitre Gryngo, El, pseud.: Pidgin-Spanish, Nation, vol. lxii, p. 323. 

Calcano, Julian: El Castellano en Venezuela; Caracas, 1897. 

Cisneros, Jeremias: Hondurenismos, Revista del Archivo y de la Biblioteca 
Nacional de Honduras, vol. iii, p. 154, p. 181, p. 212, p. 250, p. 282, p. 289 
and p. 313. 

Cuervo, Rufino J.: Apuntaciones Criticas Sobre el Lenguaje Bogotano, 6th ed.; 
Paris, 1914. 

Dihigo, Juan M.: El Hablar Popular al Traves de la Literatura Cubana, Rev. de 
la Faoultad de Letras y Ciencias de la Unwersidad de la Habana, vol. xx, 
p. 53. 

Espinosa, Aurelio M.: Cuentitos Populares Nuevo-Mejicanos y su Transcripcidn 
Fondtica, Bulletin de Dialectologie Romane, tome iv, p. 97. 

-: Studies in New Mexican Spanish, Revue de Dialectologie Romane, tome i, 

p. 157 and p. 269; tome iii, p. 251; tome iv, p. 241; tome v, p. 142. 

Ferraz, Juan Fern&ndes: Nahuatlismos de Costa Rica; San Josd de Costa Rica, 
1892. 






BIBLIOGRAPHY 461 

Gagini, C.: Diccionario de Barbarismos y Provincialismos de Costa Rica; San 
Jos6 de Costa Rica, 1893. 

Hills, E. C.: New Mexican Spanish, Pub. Modern Language Assoc., vol. xxi, 
p. 706. 

Lamao, M. E.: Apuntaciones Criticas el Idioma Castellano; Santa Marta (Colom¬ 
bia), 1920. 

Macias, Jose Miguel: Diccionario Cubano; Vera Cruz, 1885. 

Malaret, Augusto: Diccionario de Provincialismos de Puerto Rico; San Juan, 
1917. 

Marden, C. C.: The Phonology of the Spanish Dialect of Mexico City; Baltimore, 
1896. 

Maspero, G.: Sobre Algunas Particularidades Foneticas del Espanol Hablado por 
los Campesinos de Buenos Aires y de Montevideo; Halle, 1862. 

Maspero, J.: Singularidades del Espanol de Buenos Ayres, Memorias de la Socie- 
dad de Lingiiistica de Paris, tome ii. 

Membreno, Alberto: Hondurenismos; Tegucigalpa, 1897. 

Mendoza, Eufemio: Apuntes lara un Catalogo Razonado de las Palabras Mex- 
icanas Introducidas al Castellano; Mexico, 1872. 

Montori, Arturo: Modificaciones Populares del Idioma Castellano en Cuba; 
Havana, 1916. 

Pichardo, Esteben: Diccionario Provincial Casi-Razonado de Vozes y Frases 
Cubanas, 4th ed.; Havana, 1875. 

Prada, M. G.: Pajinas Libres; Paris, 1894. 

Ramos y Duarte, Felix: Diccionario de Mejicanismos, . . . 2nd ed.; Mexico, 1898. 

Retana, W. E.: Diccionario de Filipinismos; Madrid, 1921. 

Rincon, Pedro Antonio de: Gramatica y Vocabulario Mejicanos; Mexico, 1885. 

Robelo, Cecilio A.: Diccionario de Aztequismos; Mexico, 1906. 

Roman, Manuel Antonio: Diccionario de Chilenismos, Revista Catdlica (Santiago 
de Chile), vols. i-v, 1901-18. 

Sanchez, Jesus: Glossario de Voces Castellanas Derivadas Nahiiatl 6 Mexicano; 
n. p., n. d. 

Sandoval, Rafael: Arte de la Lengua Mexicana; Mexico, 1888. 

Sanz, S. Monner: Notas al Castellano en America; Buenos Ayres, 1903. 

Starr, Frederick: Recent Mexican Study of the Native Languages of Mexico; 
Chicago, 1900. 

Toro y Gisbert, Miguel de: Americanismos, Paris, n. d. 

-: Revindicacion de Americanismos, Bol. Real Academia Espanola, tome vii, 

p. 290 and p. 443. 

Zayas y Alfonso, Alfredo: Lexicografia Antillana; Havana, 1914. 

g. Icelandic 

Stef&nsson, V.: English Loan-Nouns Used in the Icelandic Colony of North 
Dakota, Dialect Notes, vol. ii, p. 354. 

h. Italian 

Livingston, Arthur: La Merica Sanemagogna, Romcmic Review, vol. ix, p. 206. 



462 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


i. Yiddish 

Abelson, Paul: English-Yiddish Encyclopedic Dictionary; New York, 1915. 

Bassein, Leon: Di Jidishe Shprach; New York, 1914. 

Buchwald, Nathaniel: Non-English Writings: III. Yiddish (in .Cambridge His¬ 
tory of American Literature, vol. iv; New York, 1921, p. 598). 

Grolman, F. L. A. von: Die Teutsche Gauner-Jeniscke- oder Kochemer-Sprache, 
mit Besonderer Riicksicht auf die Ebraisch-Teutsche Judensprache (in 
Worterbuch der in Teutschland iiblichen Spitzbubensprachen; Giessen, 1822). 

Harkavy, Alexander: Harkavy’s Yiddish-American School; New York, 1900. 

-: A Dictionary of the Yiddish Language; New York, 1898. 

Harkavy, Alexander: English-Jewish Pocket Dictionary; New York, 1900. 

Levin, J. L.: Di Naie Yidishe Shul; New York, 1916. 

Meyer, Raphael: Jiddisch; Copenhagen, 1918. 

j. Portuguese 

Amaral, Amadeus: 0 Dialecto Caipira; Sao Paulo, 1920. 

Cintro, Assis: Questoes de Portuguez; Sao Paulo, 1921. 

Nobiling, O.: Brasileirismos e Crioulismos, Revue de Dialectologie Romane, tome 
iii, p. 189. 

Ribeiro, Joao: A Lingua Nacional; Sao Paulo, 1921. 

Romero, Sylvio: Historia de Litteratura Brasileira, 2nd ed.; Rio de Janeiro, 1902. 

Verissimo, Jos6: Estudos de Litteratura Brasileira, 6ta serie; Rio de Janeiro. 
1907. 


k. General 

Smith, L. Pearsall: The English Element in Foreign Languages, English, March, 
April, July, Aug., Sept., Oct., Nov., 1919. 

Talbot, Winthrop: Teaching English to Aliens, a Bibliography of Text-books, 
Dictionaries and Glossaries, and Aids to Librarians; Washington, 1918. 


11 . 


OTHEB COLONIAL DIALECTS OF ENGLISH 

a. Australian 

Anon.: The Australian Accent, Triad (Sydney), Nov. 10, 1920. 

Dennis, C. J.: Glossary (in Doreen and the Sentimental Bloke; New York, 
1916). 

Lentzer, Karl: Worterbuch der Englischen Volkssprache Australiens und der 
Englischen Mischsprachen; Halle, 1891. 

-: Colonial English; London, 1891. 

Morris, Edward E.: Austral English . . . ; London, 1898. 

b. Beach-la-Mar 

Church, William: Beach-la-Mar: the Jargon or Trade Speech of the Western 
Pacific; Washington, 1911. 




BIBLIOGRAPHY 


463 


c. South African 

Pettman, Charles: Africanderisms: a Glossary of South African Colloquial Words 
and Phrases; London, 1913. 


d. Canadian 

Chamberlain, A. F.: List of Articles on “Canadian English,” Dialect Notes, 
vol. i, p. 53. 

Geikie, A. S.: Canadian English, Canadian Journal, vol. ii, p. 344. 

Lighthall, W. D.: Canadian English, Week (Toronto), Aug. 16, 1889. 

McLean, John: Western Americanisms (in The Indians: Their Manners and 
Customs; Toronto, 1889, pp. 197-201). 

Mott, L. F.: Canada Word-List, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 332. 

Tweedie, W. M.: British Maritime Provinces Word-List, Dialect Notes, vol. i, 

p. 377. 

e. East Indian 

Yule, Henry (and A. C. Burnell) : Hobson-Jobson: a Glossary of Anglo-Indian 
Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geo¬ 
graphical and Discursive; new ed., ed. by Wm. Crooke; London, 1903. 

f. Pidgin-English 

C. P. A.: Pigeon English ou Bichelamar, Revue de Linguistique, tome xlvi, p. 
109 and p. 184. 

Dobson, William F.: Pidgin-English, Argosy, vol. Ixxiii, p. 105. 

Lentzer, Karl: Worterbuch der Englischen Volkssprache Australiens und der 
Mischsprachen; Halle, 1891. 


12 . 

SLANG 

A. F. L.: English As She Is Spoke, Baltimore Evening Sun, Nov. 18, 1920. 

Allen, E. A.: The Origin in Literature of Vulgarisms, Chautauquan, Nov., 1890. 
Andrews, Eliza Frances: Slang and Metaphor, Chautauquan, vol. xxiii, p. 462. 
Anon.: Dictionnaire des Termes Militaires et de l’Argot Poilu; Paris, 1916. 

-: French Soldier Slang, Times Literary Supplement, Aug. 28, 1919. 

-: L’Argot Poilu, Times Literary Supplement, July 27, 1916. 

■——: The Philosophy of Slang, Littell’si Living Age, vol. ccxxiii, p. 324. 

-: Quick Lunch Lingo, Literary Digest, March 18, 1916. 

-: Slang in Our Colleges, Bookman, vol. v, p. 448. 

-: Supplement Comprising Words Coined, Introduced or Brought Into Popu¬ 
lar Use During the Great War (in Cassell’s New English Dictionary; Lon¬ 
don, 1919). 

-: War and the Language, Times Literary Supplement, Aug. 6, 1919. 

-: The War’s Verbal Bequest, Philadelphia Public Ledger, Oct. 20, 1919. 

-: W T ord-Coining and Slang, Living Age, July 13, 1907. 

Babbitt, E. H.: College Words and Phrases, Dialect Notes, vol. ii, p. 3. 













464 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Barrere, Albert (and Chas. G. Leland) : A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant, 
2 vols.; New York, 1889. 

Baumann, H.: Londonismen (Slang and Cant), 2nd ed.; Berlin, 1902. 

Bergmann, Karl: Wie der Feldgraue Spricht; Giessen, 1916. 

Bolwell, Robert: College Slang Words and Phrases, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, 
p. 231. 

Bosson, Olaf E.: Slang and Cant in Jerome K. Jerome’s Works; Cambridge, 
England, 1911. 

Bowen, Edwin W.: What is Slang? Popular Science Monthly, vol. Ixviii, p. 127. 

Conant, R. W.: Classic Slang, Dial, vol. xx, p. 63. 

Cook, Edward: Words and the War (in Literary Recreations; London, 1919),. 

Crofton, A. F. B.: The Language of Crime, Popular Science Monthly, vol. i, 
p. 831. 

Dauzet, Albert: L’Argot de la Guerre; Paris, 1918. 

Dawson, A. H.: A Dictionary of English Slang and Colloquialisms; New York, 
1913. 

Dechelette, Francois: L’Argot des Poilus; Paris, 1918. 

Delcourt, Rene: Expressions d’Argot Allemand et Autrichien; Paris, 1917. 

Delesalle, Georges: Dictionnaire Argot-Francais et Francais-Argot; Paris, 1896. 

Esnault, Gaston: Le Poilu tel qu’il se Parle; Paris, 1919. 

Farmer, John S. (and W. E. Henley) : Slang and its Analogues, 7 vols.; London, 
1890-1904. 

Garver, Milton: French Army Slang, Modern Language Notes, vol. xxxii, p. 151; 
vol. xxxv, p. 508. 

Giles, Richard: Slang and Vulgar Phrases; New York, 1913. 

Gore, Willard C.: Notes on Slang, Modern Language Notes, vol. xi, p. 385. 

Graham, G. F.: Slang Words and Americanisms (in A Book About Words; 
London, 1869). 

Grasserie, Raoul de la: fitude Scientifique sur l’Argot et le Parler Populaire; 
Paris, 1907. 

-: La Psychologie de l’Argot, Revue Philosophique, vol. lx, p. 260. 

Grose, Francis: A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue; London, 1785. 

[Hall, B. H.]: A Collection of College Words and Customs; Cambridge (Mass.), 
1851; 2nd ed., 1856. 

Hamdorf, Adolf: Ueber die Bestandtheile des Modernen Pariser Argots; Berlin, 
1886. 

Harvey, B. T.: Navy Slang, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 150. 

Hecker, E. A. (and Edmund Wilson, Jr.) : The Vocabulary of the A. E. F. 

(not published). 

Higginson, T. W.: American Flash Language in 1798, Science, May, 1885. 

Hoche, P.: Psychologie des Schlagworts, Kunsticart, vol. xxv, p. 4. 

Hochstetter, Gustav: Der Feldgraue Biichmann; Berlin, 1916. 

Horn, Paul: Die Deutsche Soldatensprache, 2nd ed.; Giessen, 1905. 

Hotten, John Camden: A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words 
. . . ; London, 1859. 

Kildare, Owen: The Jargon of Low Literature, Independent, vol. lxi, p. 139. 

King, R. W.: Slang in War-Time, Atheneeum, Aug. 8, 1919. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 465 

Krueger, G.: Was ist Slang, Beziiglich Argot? (in Festschrift Adolf Taber; 
Braunschweig, 1905). 

Lambert, Claude: Le Langage des Poilus; Bordeaux, 1915. 

Leroy, Olivier: A Glossary of French Slang; London, 1922. 

Littman, Enno: 23 and Other Numerical Expressions, Open Court, vol. xxii, 1908. 

Long, Percy W.: Semi-Secret Abbreviations, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 245 and 
p. 357. 

Lynch, Arthur: Some Thoughts*on Slang, English, July, 1919, p. 109. 

McCutcheon, Roger P.: A Note on Cant, Modem Language Notes, vol. xxxvi, 

p. 22. 

Maitland, James: The American Slang Dictionary . . . ; Chicago, 1891. 

Matthews, Brander: The Function of Slang, Harper's Magazine, vol. lxxxviii, 
p. 304. 

Melville, A. H.: An Investigation of the Function and Use of Slang, Pedagogical 
Seminary, vol. xix, p. 94, 1912. 

Niceforo, Alfredo: Le G6nie de l’Argot; Paris, 1912. 

Paine, Ralph D.: Some Remarks on College Slang, Yale Literary Magazine 
Dec., 1893, p. 113. 

Pr6vot, Georges: Essai sur l’Emploi FigurA des.Termes de Guerre dans le Lan¬ 
gage Contemporain, Mercure de France, Jan. 16, 1919. 

Reusch, J.: Die Alten Syntaktischen Reste im Modernen Slang; Munster, 1893. 

Saineanu, Lazar: I’Argot* des Tranchees; Paris, 1915. 

Schroder, Georg: Ueber den Einfluss der Volksetymologie auf den Londoner 
Slang-Dialekt; Rostock, 1893. 

Sechrist, Frank K.: The Psychology of Unconventional Language, Pedagogical 
Seminary, vol. xx, p. 413. 

Sherman, E. B.: A Study in Current Slanguage, Critic, new series, vol. xxvii, 
p. 153. 

Sidney, F. H.: Hobo Cant, Dialect Notes, vol. v, p. 41. 

Smith, C. Alphonso: New Words Self-Defined; New York, 1919. 

Sparke, Archibald: Slang in War-Time, Athenaeum, Aug. 1, 1919. 

Spies, Heinrich: Englische Schlagworte und Kriegsschlagworte, Deutsche 
Allgemeine Zeitung, April 26, 1919. 

Therive, Andr6: L’Argot et la Langue Populaire, Revue Critique des I dees et 
des Livres (Paris), tome xxxii, p. 272. 

Tylor, E. B.: The Philology of Slang, Littel’s Living Age, vol. vi, p. 367. 

Whitman, Walt: Slang in America, North American Review, vol. cxli, p. 431. 

Wilson, A. J.: A Glossary of Colloquial Slang and Technical Terms in Use in the 
Stock Exchange and in the Money Market; London, 1895. 

Wilson, Charles B.; Dialect and Slang, Athenaeum, vol. ii, p. 291. 


13. 


EUPHEMISMS, NICKNAMES, AND FORBIDDEN WORDS 

Anon.: American Nicknames, Chambers Journal, March 31, 1875. 

-: Note on the Word “Jew,” n. p., n. d. 

-: The Slang of Yenery and Its Analogues ( unpublished ). 




466 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Hayden, Marie Gladys: Terms of Disparagement in American Dialect Speech, 
Dialect Votes, vol. iv, p. 194. 

Johnson, Burges: The Everyday Profanity of Our Best People, Century Maga¬ 
zine, June, 1916. 

McLaughlin, W. A.: Some Current Substitutes for “Irish,” Dialect Notes , vol. 
iv, p. 146. 

MacMichael, J. Holden: National Nicknames, Notes and Queries, 9th series, 
vol. iv, p. 212. 

Scott, Fred N.: Verbal Taboos, School Review, vol. xx, 1912, pp. 366-78. 

Sechrist, Frank K.: The Psychology of Unconventional Language, Pedagogical 
Seminary, vol. xx, Dec., 1913. 

Warnoek, Elsie L.: Terms of Approbation and Eulogy in American Dialect 
Speech, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, p. 13. 

-: Terms of Disparagement in the Dialect Speech of High School Pupils in 

California and New Mexico, Dialect Notes, vol. v, p. 60. 


14. 


BUDIMENTABY SPEECH 

Bolton, Henry Carrington: The Language Used in Talking to Domestic Animals, 
American Anthropologist, vol. x, p. 65 and p. 97. 

Carruth, W. H.: The Language Used to Domestic'Animals, Dialect Notes, vol. i, 
p. 263. 

Crew, Lena: Words and the Child, English, July, 1920, p. 379. 

Hall, G. Stanley: Children’s Pet Names, Amer. Jour. Psychology, vol. ix, p. 368. 

Hills, Elijah Clarence: The Speech of a Child Two Years of Age, Dialect Notes, 
vol. iv, p. 84. 

Jespersen, 0.: Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin; London, 1922. 

Lukens, Herman T.: The Speech of Children, Jour. Am. Folk-Lore, vol. viii, 
p. 158. 

Moleswortli-Roberts, H.: Inarticulate Sounds (animals), English, Dec., 1920, 
p. 434. 

Peters, A. H.: Man’s Speech to the Brutes, Chautauquan, vol. xxi, p. 67. 

15. 

THE FUTURE OF THE LANGUAGE 

Babbitt, Eugene H.: The Geography of the Great Languages, World’s Work, 
Feb., 1908. 

Bather, F. A. (and others) : Will English Become the World Language? English, 
Feb., 1921, p. 451. 

Brackebusch, W.: Is English Destined to Become the Universal Language of the 
World? Gottingen, 1868. 

Emerson, Oliver F.: The Future of American Speech, Dial, vol. xiv, p. 270. 

Long, Bernard (and others) : English vs. Esperanto As A World Language, 
English, March, 1919, p. 19. 

Matthews, Brander: Is the English Language Degenerating? (in Essays on 
English; New York, 1921). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 


467 


Matthews, Brander: One World-Language or Two? (in Essays on English; New 
York, 1921). 

Porter, D. G.: English as a Universal Language, Jour. Society of Science, vol. 
xxxii, p. 117. 

Read, Richard P.: The American Tongue, New York Sun, Feb. 26, 1918. 

Watts, Harvey M.: Need of Good English Growing as World Turns to Its Use, 
New York Sun, Nov. 9, 1919. 

Weaver, John V. A.: Serious Uses of the American Language, Double-Dealer 
(New Orleans), Oct., 1921, p. 143. 


16. 

BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF AMERICAN ENGLISH 

Anon.: Bibliography of Books and Articles on American English (supplementary 
to the bibliography published by Gilbert M. Tucker, q. v., in Tr. Albany 
Institute, 18S3), Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 13. 

Babbitt, E. H. (and others) : Bibliography of Books and Articles on American 
English, Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 344. 

Chamberlain, A. F.: List of Articles on “Canadian English,” Dialect Notes, 
vol. i, p. 53. 

Mencken, H. L.: Bibliography of American English (in The American Language, 
1st ed.; New York, 1919). 

Northrup, Clark S.: A Bibliography of the English and French Languages in 
America from 1894 to 1900, Dialect Notes, vol. ii, p. 151. 

Sheldon, Edward S. (and others) : Bibliography of American English, Dialect 
Notes, vol. i, p. 254. 

Tucker, Gilbert M.: Bibliography of American English, Tr. Albany Institute 
for 1883, p. 358. 

-: The Bibliography of the Subject (in American English; New York, 1921). 

-(and others) : Bibliography of American English, Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 80. 
























I 







LIST OF WORDS AKD PHRASES 


The parts of speech are indicated only when it is 
following abbreviations are used : 


a. adjective 

aber nit, 206, 373 

abolitionist, 101 

absquatulate, 99 

accept, n., 95 

acceptress, 91 

accessioned, 198 

accommodation-train, 100 

accouchement, 152 

ace, 380 

ace-high, 131 

ach Louie, 107 

ad, 182, 190 

adamic, 91 

addition, 63 

address, 216 

administration, 126 

admitted to probate, 128 

adobe, 104 

ad-smith, 200 

adult, 216 

advertisement, 216 

advertize, 245 

advocate, v., 38, 61 

adze, 69 

aeon, 230 

aero, 19 

aeroplane, 249 

aesthetic, 230 

aestival, 230 

aetiology, 230 

affetuoso, 91 

affiliate, 95 

Aframerican, 192 

African golf, 132 

afterwards, 188 

again, 225 

against, 225 

agenda, 118 

aggravate, 95 

agile, 226 

ag’in, 109 

a-going, 110 

ain’t, 186, 277, 296 

air-line, 100, 125 

airplane, 249 

aisle manager, 146 

Alabama, 114, 225 

alabastine, 201 

alamo, 209 

alarm, 231, 261 

alarum, 231 

alcove, 174 

alfalfa, 128 

all by her lonesome, 183n 

all-fired, 156 

alloy, 216 

ally, 216 

all year, 194 

almond, 223 

almoner, 132 

aloha, 211 

alright, 38, 254 


n. noun v. verb 

alter, 151 
altho, 251 
aluminum, 261 
am, 279 
amass, 113 
amateur, 143 
ambish, 190 
ambition, v., 62 
amen, 223 
americanize, 95 
American-pie, 207n 
Ananias club, 371 
andiron, 69 
anemia, 230 
anesthetic, 230 
angry, 118 
annex, 229 
A No. 1, 195 
ant, 114 

antagonize, 61, 164 
ante, v., 104 
ante up, 104,131 
anti-fogmatic, 102 
antmire, 151 
anxious-bench, 101 
anyway, 188 
anyways, 315 
apartment, 130 
apple, 113 
apple-butter, 59 
apple-jack, 103 
apple-pie, 27 
apple-sass, 323 
appreciate, 61 
arbor, 228 
Arbor day, 135 
arctics, 129 
aren’t, 186 
are you there? 121 
arkade, 254 
armistice, 216 
armoir, 209 
armor, 228 
arroyo, 209 
ash-can, 59, 116, 120 
ash-cart, 116 
ash-man, 116, 120 
ask, 113 

as mad as a hornet, 97 
as mad as a March hare, 
97 

asphalt, 229 
assistant master, 124 
assurance policy, 129 
ast, 325 
ataxia, 230 
atta-boy, 321, 375 
attack, v., 279 
attackted, 279, 288 
aunt, 113, 114, 222 
author, v., 198 
auto, 129, 190, 191, 194 

469 


desirable for clearness. The 


adv. adverb 

autumn, 165 
avenue, 367 
away, 167 
awful, 371 

a. w. o. 1„ 195, 380 
awry-eyed, 103 
ax, 229 

babies’-class, 123 
baby-carriage, 166 
baccalaureate, 146 
bach, v., 191 
back and fill, v., 96, 394 
back-country. 59 
backfisch, 373n 
back-garden, 166 
back-log, 59 
back-number, 98, 164 
back pedal, v., 181 
back-settlements, 59 
back-settlers, 59 
back-talk, 98 
back-taxes, 98 
back water, v., 96 
backwoods, 59, 61 
backwoodsman, 52, 59, 162 
back-yard, 116, 129, 164, 
166 

baddest, 316 
bag, 155 

baggage, 27, 45, 116 
baggage-car, 116 
baggage-check, 100 
baggage-master, 100 
baggage-room, 100 
baggage-smasher, 100, 197 
bagman, 117 
balance, n., 63 
balk, 229 
ballast, 116 
balled-up, 1S2. 199 
ballot-box, 127 
ball up, v., 199 
ballyhoo. 111 
balm, 114, 223 
band-wagon, 16 
bang-up. a., 199 
banjo, 56 
bank-account, 126 
bank-holiday, 28, 118, 130, 
135 

banking-account, 126 
banner-state, 101 
bant, 189 
barb, v., 191 
barbecue, 52, 56 
barber-shop, 116 
barber’s-shop, 116 
bargain, v., 174 
baritone, 230 
bark, 230 
barkeep, n., 190 
barkeep, v., 191 


470 


LIST OF WORDS AND PHRASES 


bark up the wrong tree, 
96 

barmaid, 125 
barman, 125 
barn, 64 
barque, 230 
barrel, 197 
barrel-house, 103 
barren, 58, 361 
barrister, 127 
bartender, 15, 103, 125 
bas-relief, 225 
basswood, 58 
bat, 103 
bath, 116 
bath-robe, 116 
bath-tub, 116 
batteau, 55, 104, 131 
batting-average, 130 
batty, 197 
bay, n„ 66 
bayberry, 66 
bayou, 104 
bay-window, 69, 164 
be. 279 
beanery, 192 
beastly, 24 
beat, v., 279 
beat up, 199 
beaut, 190, 375 
beautifullest, 316 
become, 279 
beef, n., 69 
beef, v., 394 
bee-line, 60 
been, 226 
beet, 116, 121 
beet-root. 116, 121 
begin, 279 
begob, 109 
begorry, 109 
behavior, 228 
behoove, 231 
behove, 231 
bejabers, 157 
be left at the post, 96 
belgiumize, 197 
belittle, 61, 163 
bell-hop, 98-99 
bell-polisher, 373n 
belly-robber, 379 
bend, v., 279 
benefice, 132 
bet, v., 279 
betterment, 99 
bet your life, 110 
bevo-officer. 380 
bible, v„ 197 
bid, 116 
biff, 375, 394 
big-bug, 98 
big-chief, 54 
big-stick, 371 
bile, v„ 109, 322 
bill-board. 37, 116, 120, 

172 

billion, 98 
bind. 279 
bindery, 61 
biograph, v., 181 
biplan, 249 
biplane, 249 
bird, 375 
biscuit, 117, 373n 
bishop, 102 
bitch, 150 
bite, v., 279 
black-country, 128 
black-stripe, 102 
blankety, 156 


blather, 225 

bleachers, 125, 130, 196 

bleed, 279 

bleeding, 158 

blimp, 379 

blind-pig, 103 

blizzard. 98, 128, 164, 165 

block, 371 

block-head, 375 

blond, 258 

blonde, 258 

blooded, 63 

blood-poison, 152 

bloody. 24, 157 

bloomer, 98 

blouse, 119, 121 

blow, v., 62, 279 

blow-out, 98 

blue-blazer, 102 

blue-grass, 58 

bluff, n., 58 

bluff, v.. 163, 394 

blurb, 192 

blurt, 192 

blutwurst, 106 

bo, 191 

boar, 151 

board-school, 118, 123 
boardwalk, 116 
bobby, 125 
bob-sled, 59 
boche. 341, 378 
bock-beer, 106 
boffos, 373n 
bog, 59, 128 
bogie, 100, 119 
bogus, 55. 63, 97 
bohee, 341 
boheme, v„ 191 
bohick, 341 
bohunk, 341 
boiled-shirt, 98 
boomer, 95 
bolt, v., 101 
bolter, 101 
bonanza, 104 
bonds, 126n 

bone-head, 156, 196, 197, 
375 

bonnet, 117 

boob, 15, 156, 161, 191, 

197 

boocoop, 380 
boodle, v., 101, 160 
boodler, 101 
book, 125 

booking-office. 100, 119 
boom, 376 
boom, v., 34, 95, 164 
boom-town, 95 
boost, n., 15 

boost, v., 95, 160, 164, 

192 

boot,*" 116, 119, 125, 130, 
171 

bootery, 192 
boot-lace, 119 
boot-legger, 16, 103 
boot-maker, 65, 119, 171 
boot-polish, 119 
boot-shop, 65 
boot-tree, 119 
booze-foundry, 375 
booze-hister, 323 
boozery, 192 
borough. 364 
bosom, 152 

boss, n., 15, 56, 127, 161 
boss, v., 95, 164, 393, 394 
boss-rule, 101 


bottom, v., 51 
bottom-dollar, 98 
bottom-land, 58 
bottoms, 58 
boughten, 279. 288 
boulevard, 207, 327, 367 
bouncer, 95, 103 
bourgeois, 134 
bower, 107 
bowler, 117, 121 
box-car, 100 
bozart, 258 
braces, 119, 121 
brancken, 59, 117 
brain-storm, 181 
brainy, 97 
brakeman, 116 
brakesman, 116 
branch, n., 58, 272 
brand-new. 219 
brandy, 189 

brandy-cbamparelle, 102 

brandy-crusta, 102 

brash, 97 

brave, n., 104 

breadery, 192 

breadstuffs, 52, 63 

break, 279 

break away, v., 394 

breakdown, 56 

breakfast-food, 116 

brethren, 326 

breve, 134 

brevier, 134 

briar, 231 

bridge-fiend, 200 

brier, 231 

brig, 189 

brilliant. 134 

bring, 279 

brioche, 209 

broiler, 122 

broke, 279 

broker, 126 

bronchitis. 226 

bronco, 104 

bronco-buster, 104 

brung, 279, 284 

brush-ape, 373n 

brusk, 232 

bryanize, 197 

bub, 69 

buck, v., 151 

bucket, 125 

bucket-shop, 163 

buck-private, 182, 379 

buck the tiger, 96 

buckwheat, 27 

buffer, 116 

buffet, 146 

bug, 150, 197 

bugaboo, 98 

build, 279 

bull. 151 

bulldoze, v., 95. 101 
bull-frog, 57, 58 
bum, a., 200 
bum, adv., 107, 200 
bum, n., 34, 106, 200 
bum v., 107, 150, 200 
bummery, 107 
bumper, 100, 116 
bunco, 33 

buncombe, 98, 101, 163, 

231 

bunco-steerer, 15 
bung-starter, 103 
bunk. 33 
bunkum, 231 

bunned, 103 


LIST OF WORDS AND PHRASES 


471 


burden, 230 
bureau, 55 
burg, 364 
burgh, 364 
burglarize, 34 
burgle, 95, 191 
burgoo-pienic, 128 
burlesk, 254 
burly, 70 
burn, 279 
burro, 104 
burst, 279 
burthen, 230 
bus, 189, 378 
bush, 56, 182, 393 
busher, 130 
bush-town, 56 
bush-whacker, 56 
business-block, 129 
bust, v., 44, 103, 182, 279, 
288, ^79 
buster, 44 
butch, 191 
butte, 104 
butterine, 28, 146 
butter-muslin, 116 
butter-nut, 58 
butt in. 181, 199 
buttinski, 46, 199, 206 
buttle, 191 
buy, 279 
buzz-saw, 98 
by golly, 156 
by gosh, 156 
by-law, 116 
byre, 59 
cab, 189 
caballero, 209 
cabaret, 207 
cablegram, 192 
caboose, 55, 100 
cache, 55 
cachexia, 230 
cadet, 153 
cafe, 146, 207, 256 
cafeteria, 193 
cake-eater, 373n 
cake-walk, 98 
calaboose, 56 
calamity-howler, 98 
calendar, 116 
caliber, 229 
calico, 121 
call-down, 199 
calm, 223 
calumet, 54 
calvary, 326 
camerado, 91 
camera-hospital, 201 
camino, 209 
camorra, 207 

camouflage, v., 163n, 181, 
373 

campaign, 116 
camp-meeting, 59 
campus, 98, 125 
can, n., 116, 120, 125 
can v., 279 
candidacy, 101 
candor, 228 
candy, 116, 121 
candy-store, 15 
cane, 116, 130 
cane-brake, 59 
canned-goods, 116, 120 
canned-monkey, 379 
cannon, 116 
cannon-ball, 145 
canoe, 54, 131 
canon, 132 


can’t 114, 222 
canter, 189 
canuck. 104, 341 
canvas-back, 58 
canvass, 116 
canyon, 104, 258 
capote Anglaise, 342n 
captain, 140 
cap the climax, 96 
car, 27, 116 
carborundum, 201 
card, 218 

card up his sleeve, 131, 162 
care-taker, 118, 130 
caribou, 53, 55 
carnival, 99 
carom, 116 

carpet-bagger, 98, 101 
carriage, 27, 116 
carriage-paid, 118, 121 
carrier, 100 
carry-all, 55, 61 
carry on, v., 170 
cars, 54n 
cascaret, 201 
cash in, 131 
casket, 149 
castrate, 151 
catalog, 229, 251 
catalpa, 53 
cat-boat. 28, 60 
catch, 279 
caterpillar, 113 
Catholic, 133 
catnip, 128 
cat’s pajamas, 373n 
catsup, 231 
catty-cornered, 70 
caucus, 52, 100, 159 
caucus v., 61 
caucusdom, 160 
caucuser, 160 
cause-list, 116 
cavort, 62 
cayuse, 104 
cellarette, 193 
cellar-smeller. 373n 
census, v., 198 
cent, 60 

center, 229, 361 
cesspool, 69 
chain-gang, 98 
chair, 151 
chair-car, 100 
chairman, 126 
chair-warmer, 99 
chalkologist, 193 
chambers, 130 
champ, 190 
champeen, 324 
chancellor, 124 
chandelle, 380 
channel, 128 
chaparral, 104, 209 
chapel, 133. 173 
chapter, 132 
char, 69 

char-k-banc, 119 
charley-horse, 130 
chase, n., 59 
chase one’s self, 394 
chaser, 103 
chauf, 191 
Chautauqua, 134 
chautauquan, 169 
chaw, v., 109 
check, 230 
checkers, 116 
cheese-cloth, 116 
chef-d’oeuvre, 327 


chemist, 117 
chemist’s shop, 117 
cheque, 230 
chequered, 247 
chest, 225 

chew the rag, v., 394 
chicken, 122, 373 
chicken-yard, 116 
chiclet, 201 
chicory, 122 

chief-constable, 116, 124 
chief-of-police, 116, 124 
chief-reporter, 116 
china-hospital, 201 
chinch, 69 
Chinee, 315 
chink, n., 95, 342 
chink, v., 34 
chinkapin, 53 
chin-music, 197 
chip in, v., 131, 394 
chipmunk, 53 
chipped-beef, 98 
chist, 324 
chlorine, 226 
chocolate, 224 
choo-choo, 122 
choose, 279 
chop-suey, 112 
chore, 70. 125, 171 
chortle, 192 
chow, 380 
chowder, 55 
Cbrister, 157 
chromo, 190 
chump, 71 
chunky, 63 
churchman, 133 
chute, 104 
cider, 230 
cigaret, 232 
cinch, n., 15, 104 
cinch, v., 104 
cinema, 16 
circuit-rider, 134 
circus-play, 130 
citified, 94 
citizenize, 94, 197 
city, 126, 364 
city-editor, 116, 126 
city-men, 126 
city-ordinance, 116 
city-stock, 126n 
circus, 368 
civil-servant, 125 
claim-jumper, 98 
clam-bake, 128 
clam-chowder, 128 
clamor, 228 
clangor, 228 
clap-board, 52, 59 
class-day, 124 
classy, 34, 200, 317 
claw-hammer, 28, 98 
cleanlily, 314 
clean-up, 15 
clearing, n., 58 
clear the track, v., 100 
clerk, n., 27n, 227 
clerk v., 62 
clever, 70 
climb, 279 
cling, 279 
cling-stone, 58 
clipping, 116 
clock-watcher, 197 
clodhopper, 69 
clomb, 283 
closed-season, 117 
closet, 157 


472 


LIST OF WORDS AND PHRASES 


closure, 231 
clothes-line, 373n 
cloture, 231 
cloud-burst, 98, 128 
clout the sphere, 377 
club-car, 100 
clum, 285 
clysmic, 202 
coal, 117 
coal-oil, 117 
coal-operator, 166 
coal-owner, 166 
coals, 117 
coast, v., 95 
coat-and-skirt, 121 
coatee, 94 
cocain, 240 
cock, 27n, 118, 151 
cocktail, 102 
C. O. D„ 194 
codfish, a., 34, 97 
co-ed, 28, 190, 194 
co-education, 165 
coffin-nail, 197 
cohanize, 197 
coiner, 117 
coke, 190 
coke-fiend, 200 
cold-deck, 131 
cold-feet, 169 
cold-slaw, 56, 258 
cold-snap, 59, 98 
cole-slaw, 258 
collar-button, 117 
collateral, 99 
colleen, 108 
collide, v., 95, 164 
colony, 150 
color, 228 
Colorado, 225 
combe, 59 
come, 279 

come across, 181, 373 
come-down, 98, 181, 199 
come-on, 161, 376 
come out at the little end 
of the horn, 96 
commencement, 124 
commission-agent, 117 
commission-merchant, 117 
committee, 126 
common, «... 59 
common-loafer, 107 
commutation-ticket, 100, 
117 

commute, 100, 191 
commuter, 100 
company, 126 
compensable, 200 
complected, 63 
compromit, 62 
con, «., 190 
con, v., 191 
conant, 210 
concertize, 94 
conch, 371 
condensery, 192 
conductor, 27, 100, 117, 171 
conductorette, 193 
confab, 190 
conflagrative. 62 
congressional. 63 
connection, 231 
conniption, 98 
consociational, 91, 94 
consols, 126 
constable, 118, 125 
constituency, 126 
convocation, 132 
cookey, 56 


cook-general, 120 
cooler, 102 
coon, 190 
cootie, 378 
copious, 70 
copper-head, 58 
cord, 62 
cord-wood, 69 
corn, 27, 65, 117, 122 
corn-cob, 59 
corn-crib, 59 
corn-dodger, 59 
corned, 103 
corner, 95 
corner-loafer, 106 
corn-factor, 117 
corn-fed, 196 
corn-juice, 103 
corn-market, 166 
corn-meal, 117 
corn-whiskey, 103 
corp, 380 
corporation, 126 
corpse-reviver, 103 
corral, n., 34, 104 
corral, v., 104 
coster, 117 
costume, 121 
cosy, 231 
cougar, 53 
council, 126 
councilor, 229 
council-school, 123 
counselor, 229 
counterfeiter, 117 
courthouse, 361, 364 
cow-catcher, 37, 100 
cow-country, 182 
cow-creature, 151 
cowhide, v., 57 
cove, 361 
coyote, 104 
cozy, 231 
crab-cocktail, 128 
cracker, 65, 117 
crack up, 96 
craft, 113 
crank, 99 
crap, 324 

crape-hanger, 373n 
craps, 28 
crasher, 373n 
crashing-party, 373n 
crawfish, 122 
crayfish, 122 
crazy-bone, 117 
crazy-quilt, 60 
cream, 146 
creche, 208 
credit-trade, 117, 121 
creek, 59, 64, 128, 226, 394 
creep, 279 

crfeme de menthe, 327 
creole, 56 
crep, 279, 287 
crSpe, 256 
crevasse, 104 
crick, 323 
cricket, 131 
crickey, 156 
criminal-assault, 152 
criminal-operation, 152 
crisco, 201 
crispette, 193, 201 
critter, 323 
crook, n., 15, 161 
crook the elbow, 103 
crope, 279 

crossing-plate, 100, 117 
crossing-sweeper, 119, 124 


cross-purposes, 69, 164 

cross-roads, 361 

cross-tie, 117 

crotchet, 134 

crow, 127, 279 

crown, 60 

cruet, 166 

cruller, 56 

crypt, 132 

crystal, 117 

cubicle, 174 

curate, 132 

curb, 233 

curio, 189 

cuspidor, 129, 146, 207 
cuss, 156, 190 
cussedness, 99 
cussword, 156 
customable, 62 
cut, 279 

cut a swath, 96 
cute, 63 
cuticura, 202 
cutlas, 231 
cut no ice, 376 
cut-off, 98 

cutting, n. 116, 127 
cut-up, 199 
cyclone, 128, 164 
cyder, 230 
czar, 231 
daffy, 16 
dago, 28, 341 
damaskeene, 202 
damfino, 156 
damn, 157 
damndest, 156n 
damphool, 156 
dance, 113, 114, 222 
D. & D„ 195 
dander, 56 
dare, 279 

darken one’s doors, 62 
darkey, 63 
darkle, 95n 
darn, 155 
data, 225 
daunt, 114 
day-coach, 100 
daylight-saving-time, 130 
daylight-time, 117 
deacon, v., 94, 146 
dead, 110 

dead-beat, 15, 98, 161 
dead head, n„ 163 
dead-head, v., 100 
deaf, 115, 225, 323 
deal, 279 
deals, 118 

dean, 124, 132, 146 
d6but, n., 256 
d6but, v., 198 
decalog, 251 
decent, 155 
deck, 98 
d6collet6, 327 
Decoration day, 135 
decoy, 216 
deed, t\, 61 
defect, 216 
defense, 231 
defi, 190, 194 
deficit, 216 
deft, 70 

delicatessen, 106, 169 
delinquent, 149 
deliverness, 91 
dell, 59 

demagogue, v., 181 
demean, 64 


LIST OF WORDS AND PHRASES 


473 


demeanor, 228 

demisemiquaver, 134 

demoralize, 61 

demote, v., 198, 279 

denouement, 256 

dental-surgeon, 145 

department-store, 117, 121 

depot, 100, 161, 207, 257 

deputize, 62 

derange, 61 

derby, 117, 121, 164 

desperado, 104 

dessert, 130 

details, 216 

detour, 327 

deuces-wild, 131 

devilled-crab, 128 

dewdropper, 273n 

diamond, 134, 226 

diarrhea, 230 

diary, 226 

dicker, v., 62 

dictograph, 201 

die with one’s boots on, 96 

diff, 190 

dig, 279 

diggins, 99 

dim-box, 373n 

dime-novel. 117 

diminute, 91 

din, 69 

dincher, 373n 

diner, 100, 190 

diphtheria, 219 

diphthong, 219 

directly, 24, 135 

direct-primaries, 127 

dirt, 157 

dirty, 314 

disorderly-house, 152, 153 
dissenter, 132, 134 
district, 117, 126 
dive, n., 15, 103, 161 
dive, v., 280 
divide, n., 58 
division, 117, 118, 127 
divorcee, 256, 327 
divvy, «., 131, 190 
divvy, v., 101, 191 
do, 280 

do a land-office business, 96 

docket, 99 

doctor, n., 139, 146 

dodge the issue, 96 

doesn’t, 296 

doggery, 99, 103, 192 

dog-gone, 156 

do him proud, 183 

dole, 284 

dollar, 60 

dollars to doughnuts, 182 
doll-hospital, 201 
dolled-up, 182 
doll up, 199 
don, 124 

donate, 38, 64, 164 
don’t, 296 

dope, n., 36, 376, 394 
dope out, 112, 181 
dopester, 193 
double-header, 130 
double-pica, 134 
double-team, 65 
dough, 161 
dough-boy, 182, 380 
do up brown, 96 
dove, v., 280n, 284 
dowager, 150 
down-and-out, 34, 99 
down-East, 128 


downs, 59, 128 
down-town, 96 
down-train, 129 
downwards, 187 
doxologer, 203 
doxologize, 38, 91, 94 
draft, 114, 230 
draftee, 193 
drag, 280 
drains, 119 
drama, 223 
draper, 125 
draper’s-shop, 117 
draught, 230 
draughts, 116 
draw, «., 63, 190, 280 
draw a bead, 62 
drawed, 280 
drawing-pin, 119 
drawing-room, 118, 121 
dream, 280 
dreampt, 288 
dreamt, 247 
drempt, 280 
dressing-gown, 116 
dressmake, v., 191 
drillery, 193 
drily, 231 
drink, v., 280 
drive, v.. 280, 367 
drown, 280 

drowned, 109, 280, 288 
drug, v., 280, 285 
drug-fiend, 200 
druggist, 117 
drug-store, 117, 164 
drummer, 15, 117 
dry, n., 28 
dry-goods, 65 
dry-goods-store, 117 
dryly, 231 
dub, 15, 169, 376 
duck, 103 
duck’s-quack, 373n 
dud, 378 
dude, 54n 
dug-out, 98 
dumb, 107 
dumb-bell, 196 
dumdora, 373n 
dumbfound, 192 
dumb-head, 108n 
dumb-waiter, 28 
dump, v.j 62 
Dunkard, 134 
dust-bin, 116, 120 
dust-cart, 116 
dustman, 116, 120 
dutchie, 342 
dutiable, 52, 62 
duty, 227 
dysentery, 218 
each other, 184 
eagle, 60 
earlier’n, 317 
easy-mark, 376 
eat, 280 
eat crow, 101 
eclaircise. 91 
<5elat, 256 
ecology, 230 
ecumenical, 228 
edema, 230 


edged, 103 
editorial, 117 
eel-grass, 58 
effuse, 91 
egg, 225, 373n 
egg-plant, 58, 128 
either, 115 


eldorado, 104 
electrocute, 192 
electrolier, 192, 201 
elevator, 15, 63, 117, 161, 
172 

elevator-boy, 117 
61ite, 256 
ellum, 71, 326 
elocute, 191 
emerald, 134 
emote, 191 
employ^, 145, 207 
employee, 240 
employment-bureau, 55n 
enceinte, 152 
enclose, 230 
encyclopedia, 230 
endeavor. 228 
endive, 122 
endorse, 95, 230 
end-seat-hog, 196 
engineer, n„ 100 
engineer, v., 34, 95, 164 
engine-driver, 118 
English, 134 
engulf, 246 
enlisted-man, 117 
enquire, 230 
enthuse, 95, 181 
envelop, n., 229 
eolian, 232 
eon, 230 
epaulet, 229 
Episcopalian, 133 
errata, 225 
esophagus, 230 
estate-agent, 127 
esthetic, 230 
estival, 230 
et, 280, 284 
etiology, 230 
6tude, 327 
euchred, 162 
European plan, 136 
evensong, 173 
evincive. 63 
exact, 95n 
example, 114 
excess, 216 
exchange, 146 
excursionist, 164 
excurt, 95 

executive-session, 101 
exfluncticate, 99 
expos6, 207, 258 
express, v., 100 
express-car, 100 
expressman, 100 
express-office, 100 
express-train, 117 
ex-seventh, 123 
extraordinary, 215, 218 
eye-opener, 103 
face-cloth. 119 
face the music, 62 
factor, 117 
fad, 189 

fade away, v., 394 
fagot, 229 
faith-healing, 165 
fake, 394 
faker, 28 

fall, 10, 15, 69, 161, 280 

fall, v„ 280 

fall down, 181 

fallen woman, 152 

fall for it, 376 

fan, n„ 130 

fancy, 222 

fanlight, 119 


474 


LIST OF WORDS AND PHRASES 


fan-tan, 112 
far, 114 
farina, 226 
farmerette, 193 
fast, 113 
fast-freight, 100 
father, 114 

Father of Waters, 103 
Father Time, 373n 
faucet, 119 
favor, 228 
favorite-son, 101 
featurette, 193 
feaze, 95 
feed, 280 
feel, 280 
fell, 59 

fellowship, i'., 38, 70 

felonious-attack, 152 

female, n., 151 

fen, 59 

fences, 101 

fern, 117 

ferry, 361 

fertile, 226 

fervor, 228 

fetch. 280 

fete, 207 

feature, v., 15. 164, 181 

finance, 256, 327 

flat, 202 

fiber, 229 

fiddled. 103 

fiend, 200 

fight, 280 

figure, 227 

filibuster, 101 

filing-cabinet, 117 

fillet, 119, 121 

fill the bill, 96 

films, 118 

filthy, 314 

finale, 91 

finale-hopper, 373n 

find, 280 

fine, 280 
finger, 103 
finish up, 199 
fire, v., 100 
fire-alarm, 373n 
fire-brigade, 117, 124 
fire-bug, 98 
fire-department, 117 
fire-eater, 98, 375 
fire-laddie, 125 
fire-water, 16, 54 
first-floor, 120 
first-standard, 123 
fish-dealer, 117 
fish-monger, 117 
fish-plate, 100 

fit. 280n 
fitten, 280n 
fix, v., 136 
fixed in basin, 130 
fizz, 102 
fizzle, v., 62 
fizzle out, 96 
flagman, 100 
flang, 280 
flannelette. 193 
flap-jack. 69 
flapper, 373n 
flat, n., 130 
flat-boat, 98 
flat-car, 100 
flat-footed, 34, 96, 164 
fiat-wheeler, 373n 
flavor, 228 
fletcherize, 197 


flier, 145 
fling, 280 
floater, 101 
floor-walker, 117, 146 
floozy, 203 
flop-flop. 111 
flow, 280 
flu, 190, 375 
flume, 15 
flunk, 192 
flurry, 99 
fiuxation, 232 
fly, 280 

fly off the handle, 62 
fly-time. 45 
f. o. b„ 195 
fonograf, 254 
font, 229 
football, 131 
foot-hill, 58 
foot-path, 119, 129 
foots, 190 
foot-troops, 23 
foregather. 231 
forego. 231 
forgather, 231 
forget, 280 
forget it. 16 
forgo, 231 
fork. 58, 301 
for keeps, 131, 394 
form, n., 173, 229 
forsake, 280 
fortnight, 135 
forty-rod, 103 
forward, 188 
forwards, 315 
fotcb, 280n 
foto, 254 
foul, 130 
found, 285 

four-flusher, 131, 197 
fowl-run, 116 
fox-fire, 69 
fragile, 226 
frame-house, 59 
frame-up, 196, 199 
France, 222 
frankfurter, 106 
Franzosen, 343 
frat. 124, 190 
fraternal-order, 117 
frazzle, 162, 169 
frazzled, 103 
free-lunch, 27 
freeze, 280 
freeze on to, 96, 376 
freeze-out, 28 
freight, 117 
freight-agent. 117 
freight-car, 15, 100. 117 
freight-elevator, 117 
French-letteri 342n 
fresher, 124 
freshet, 64 
freshman, 124 
friendly-society, 117 
frier. 122 
frijole, 104, 209 
Fritzie, 378 
friz, 280n, 285 
frog. 37, 100. 117, 341 
full-house, 131 
full-stop, 118 
funds, 126 
funeral director, 145 
funeralize, 91, 94, 197 
funny, 317 
funny-bone, 117 
fuse, 231 


fuze, 231 
gab-fest, 206 
gage, 240 
gag-rule, 101, 127 
gaiety, 231 
galoot, 98 
ganof, 205, 327 
gantlet, 229 
ganz gut. 107 
gaol, 231 
garage, 225 
garbage-man, 120 
garden, 116, 129 
garden-party, 208 
garters, 117 
garter-snake, 58 
gas, 190, 197 
gasolene, 230 
gasoline, 117, 230 
gate-money, 130 
gather, 225 
gator, 190 
gauntlet, 229 
gayety, 231 
gazabo, 104 
G. B„ 195 
gee-whiz, 156 
geezer, 197 
gemiiltlichkeit, 256 
general, 140 
gentleman, 142 
gentleman-cow, 151 
gentleman-rider, 143 
gerrymander, 101, 127, 163, 
192 

gesundheit. 107 
get, 225, 280 
get ahead of, 96 
get a move on, 36 
get-away, 16 
get away with it, 375 
get by, 376 

get it in the neck, 394 
get solid with, 96, 181 
get sore, v., 394 
get the bulge on. 96 
get the deadwood on, 96 
get the drop, 96 
getting on well, 135 
get wise, 394 
ghetto, 148 
gin-fix, 102 
gin-fizz, 102 
ginger-ale, 102 
ginger-beer, 102n 
ginger-pop, 102 
gink, 166 
ginseng, 112 
gipsy, 231 

girl for general housework, 
120 

give, 280 

give him the glad hand, 376 

given-name, 71 

give out, v., 199 

glad-eye, 161 

glamor. 228 

glass, 113 

glass-arm, 130 

glebe, 132 

glide, 280 

glissade, 380 

glode. 280, 284 

go, 280 

go-aheadativeness, 38 
goatee, 99 
gob, 380 
go back, 199 
go back on, 96, 199 
go big, 187, 199 


LIST OF WORDS AND PHRASES 


475 


God-damn, 157 
go finish, 393 
go for, 96 
go-getter, 38 
going some, 36 
going strong, 394 
go it blind, 96 
go it one better, 131 
goldarned, 156 
golden-slipper, 102 
gold-fish, 379 
golf-fiend^ 200 
golfitis, 193 
goloshes. 129 
goner, 61 
gonorrhea, 153 
goober, 56 
good, 137 

good-afternoon, 136 
good-by, 229 
good-bye, 136 
good-day, 136 
good-form, 174 
good-night, 377 
goods, 117, 161 
goods-manager, 117 
goods-waggon, 100, 117 
goof. 373n 
goofy, 373n 
goo-goo, 201 
go on the war-path, 62 
goose, 341 
gopher, 55 
got, 182, 224 
gother, 283 
go the whole hog, 96 
go through, 96 
go-to-meeting, 97 
gotta, 277 

gotten. 135, 182, 280, 293 

goulash, 207 

go up Salt River, 101 

gourmand, 256 

government, 126 

governor, 119, 172 

grab, n., 193 

grab, v., 101 

grab-bag, 98 

grad, 190 

grade, 117 

gradient, 117 

gradual, 115 

grafanola, 201 

graft, n., 15, 163, 376 

graft, v., 163 

grain, 117 

grain-broker, 117 

grain-market, 166 

gram, 229 

grandificent, 203 

grandmother, 219 

grandstand-play, 130 

grape-juice-diplomacy, 196 

grass, 113, 114, 190, 222 

gray, 231 

grease-ball, 373n 

greaser, 98, 341 

great-coat, 165 

great-primer, 134 

great Scott, 156 

great shakes, 110 

Great White Father, 103 

greenhorn, 69, 164 

grewsome, 245 

grey, 231 

grip-sack, 98 

groceries, 117, 120 

grog, 189 

ground-floor, 120 

ground-hog, 58 


grove, 361 
grow, 2S0 

growed, 280, 283, 284 
growler, 125 
grub-stake, 98 
guard, n., 100, 117, 171 
gubernatorial, 38, 52, 63, 
164 

guess, v., 70 

guinea, 341 

gulch, 98 

gully, 98 

gumbo, 56, 128 

gummy, 373n 

gum-shoe, a., 36, 98 

gusher, 28 

guy, n,, 155, 169 

guyascutis, 99 

gym, 190, 194 

gypsy, 231 

Habana, 256 

haberdasher, 125 

haberteria, 193 

habit-disease, 149 

habitu6, 327 

hack, 129 

hadden, 280, 292 

hadn't ought’a, 296 

half, 222 

half-breed, 59 

ham, 190 

hamburger, 106 

hammer, 113 

hand-car, 100 

hand cuff, 373n 

hand him a lemon, 375 

hand it to him, 375 

handle without gloves, 96 

hand-out. 199 

handshaker, 379 

handsome, 113, 219 

handy, 63 

hang, 280 

happify, 38, 62 

happy-hunting ground, 103 

harbor, 218, 228 

hard, 114, 314 

hard-boiled, 379 

hard-cider, 28, 103 

hardly, 314 

hardshell, 97, 134 

hardware-dealer, 117 

hari-kari, 102 

harp, 341 

has-been, 33, 196 

hashery, 193 

hash-foundry, 196 

hash-slinger, 197 

has went, 22 

haul, n., 193 

haul, v., 65 

hausfrau, 106 

have, 280, 293 

have an ax to grind, 96 

have the floor, 96 

have the goods, 376 

hay-barrack, 56 

hay-stack, 59 

haze, 181 

head, 124 

head-cheese, 28 

head-liner, 117, 125 

head-master, 124, 125, 173 

head-mistress, 124 

headquarter, v., 198 

healthful. 187 

healthy, 187 

hear, 136, 280 

heat, 280 

health, 59 


heave, 280 
heavenwards, 188 
Hebrew, 133, 147 
heeler, 101 
heerd, 280, 284, 290 
heern, 2S0 
heft, n., 71 
heft, v., 65 
heighth, 109 
heinie, 341 
hell-box, 98 
hellion, 94 
hello, 95n 
hello-girl, 193 
hell-roaring, 94 
helluva, 156 
help, 120, 163 
helt, 281. 287 
he-man, 38 

hemidemisemiquaver, 134 
hemorrhage, 230 
hence, 315 
hen-party, 28 
here’bouts, 315 
hern, 300 
het, 280, 284 
het-up, 103 
hickory, 53 
hide, 280 
high-ball, 102 
high-boot, 116 
high-brow, 169, 196, 373n 
highfalutin, 96. 164 
high-school, 123 
hike, 169, 1S1 
hired-girl, 59 
hired-man, 59 
hire-purchase plan, 117, 
121 

His Excellency, 142 
His Honor, 142 
hisn, 300 
hisself, 310 
li’ist, 109. 280, 322 
hist'ry, 325 
hit, 280 
hitched, 394 
hither, 315 
hoakum, 201 

hoarding, 28, 116, 120, 172 

hobo, 15, 161, 169, 201 

hoch, 107 

Hock, 118, 121 

hod-carrier, 117 

hodman, 117 

hoe-cake, 45, 57, 59 

hoedown, 57 

hofbrau, 327 

hog, v., 34, 36 

hog-pen, 117 

hog-wallow, 45, 57 

hoist, 117 

hoke, 191 

hold, 281 

hold on, 108 

hold out, 131 

hold-up, 15 

hold up, r.j 371 

holler, 95. 281, 326 

holsum, 254 

holy gee, 156 

holy Joe. 379 

holy orders, 132 

holy-roller, 134 

hombre, 209 

homely, vii, 70, 165 

homer, 130 

home-run, 130 

homespun, 69, 164 

hominy, 52 


476 LIST 

homologize, 62 
hon, 190 
honor, 235, 238 
honorable, 140 
honors, 173 
hooch, 103, 207 
hooch-fest, 206 
hood, 117 
hoodlum, 15, 161 
hoodoo, 56, 125 
hook, n., 56 
hooligan, 161 
hooverize, 181, 193 
hooves, 227 
hornswoggle, 95 
horse’s-neck, 102 
horse-sense, 98 
hospital, 117 
hospitalize, 181 
hospital-nurse, 119, 122 
hostile, 226 
hostler, 231 
hot, 224 
hot-box, 100 
hotel, 146 
hot-stuffi, 169 
hot-tamale, 104 
house-clean, v., 198 
housekeep, 191 
house-master, 173 
house of detention, 150 
house of ill repute, 152 
house of refuge, 149 
hove, 284 
huckleberry, 58 
huckster, 117 
humor, 228 
Hun, 193, 378 
hunderd, 326 
hung, 285 
hunkie, 342 
hunkydory, 99 
hunting, 117, 136 
hunyadi, 341 
hurricane, 128, 164 
hurry up, 199 
hurt, 281 
hush-money, 373n 
huskerette, 193 
hustle, v., 70 
hyperfirmatious, 99n 
hypo, 190 
ice-cream, 69 
ice-cream soda, 28 
iced-water, 128 
ices, 130 
idea, 216 
idealer, 316 
ile, 322 
ill, 119, 150 
illy, 51, 183, 314 
immigrate, 61 
imperturbe, 91 
in bad, 187 
Inc., 126 
incidence, 315 
inclose. 230 
Indian, 117 
Indian-corn, 65, 117 
Indian-file, 59 
Indian-giver, 59 
Indian-meal, 117 
Indiau-summer, 59, 117 
indorse, 230 
industrial-school, 149 
inflection, 231 
influent, 63 
influential, 63, 161 
in foal, 150 
infract, 62 


OF WORDS AND PHRASES 


initative and referendum, 
127 

injunct, v., 199 
inland-revenue, 118 
inquire, 230 
inquiry, 216 
insane-asylum, 150 
insect, 150 

instalment-business, 117 
instalment-plan, 117 
instead, 225 
institutionalize, 197 
insurge, 181, 191 
intern, n., 229, 240 
internal-revenue, 118 
interview, v., 70, 165 
inure, 91 

inverted-commas, 118 
iron-horse, 100 
ironmonger, 27n, 117 
ironsides, 373n 
ish ka bibble, 205n 
itemize, 34, 95 
jackass, 156 
Jack Johnson, 379 
ack-pot, 131 
ack up, 181 
jag, 103 
jagged, 103 
jail, 149, 231, 232 
Jam, 223 
janders, 324 
janitor, n., 118 
janitor, v., 198 
jap-a-lac, 201 
Japanee, 315 
jay, 197 
jazz, 169, 201 
jeans, 69 
jell, 34, 191 
ell-o, 201 
emmy, 230 
eopardize, 95 
erked beef, 56 
jerk-water, 100 
Jerry, 378 
jersey, 165 
Jew, 133. 147 
jew, v., 65 
jewelry, 229 
Jewish cavalry, 379 
jiggered, 103 
jimmy, 230 
Jimson-weed, 58 
jine, 109, 322 
inx, 166, 201 
it, 190 

jitney, a., 34, 182 
jitney, n., 28, 200 
John-Collins, 102 
Johnny-cake, 59 
Johnny-jump-up, 58 
joiner, 27n 
joint, 118, 197 
joke-smith, 200, 373 
jolly, 136 
jonteel, 258 
Jornada, 209 
joss, 112 

journalist, 118, 127 
joy-ride, 169, 196, 200, 

288, 376 
joy-rode. 288 
uba, 56 
ubilate, 191 
judgmatical, 63 
jug, 118 
jugged. 108 
Juice, 196 
julep, 69 


jumper, 99 
Jump-off, 199 
jumping-off-place, 98 
jump on with both feet 
96 

jump or enter a claim, 96 

June-bug, 58, 128 

junior, 124 

junior-school, 123 

junk, 161 

junkets, 127 

just, 137 

kafeteria, 254 

kandy, 254 

kar, 254 

katzenjammer, 106 
keep, 281 

keep a stiff upper lip, 96 

keep company, 135 

keep tab, 96 

kep, 281 

ker, 99 

ker-bang, 99 

kerbstone, 233 

ker-flop, 99 

ker-flummux, 99 

ker-slam, 99 

ker-splash, 99 

ker-thump, 99 

ketch, 109 

ketchup, 231 

key, 56 

keyless-watch, 119 
khilifat, 256 
kibbets, 207 
kick, n., 95 
kick, v., 95 
kicker, 95 
kick-in, 199 
kick the bucket, 96 
kidding, 15 
kido, 110 
kike, 341 
kilogram, 245 
kindergarten, 106, 207 
kindness, 218 
king’s counsel, 128 
kinky, 63 
kissing-fiend, 200 
kitchenette, 193 
kitchen-fender, 166 
kittle, 324 
kitty, 131 
klaxon, 201 
kneel, 281 
knicker, 190 
knife, v., 101 
knob, 58 
knock, v., 198 
knocked up, 155 
knock into a cocked hat 
96 

knockout-drops, 394 

know, 281 

knowed, 281. 283 

know him like a book, 96 

know-nothing, 45, 162 

know the ropes, 96 

kodak. 201 

kosher, 205, 327 

kow-tow, 112 

Kreislerite, 193 

Kriss Kringle, 107 

krone, 256 

kruxingiol, 209 

ku klux, v,. 197 

kumfort, 254 

kiimmel, 107 

L„ 195 

lab, 191 


LIST OF WORDS AND PHRASES 


477 


lab. monitor, 124 
labor, 228 
laboratory, 218n 
laborer, 118 
lacrimal, 240 
lady, 143, 152 
Lady day, 135 
Lafayette, 114 
lager-beer, 106 
lagniappe, 104, 209 
la grippe, 256 
lallapalooza, 108 
lallygagger, 373n 
lamb, 146 

lame-duck, 33, 101, 127 

landlady, 219 

land-office, 59 

land-slide, 59, 101 

lane, 368 

lariat, 104 

lasso, n., 104 

lasso, v., 104 

last, 113 

late, 314 

lately, 314 

lather, 225 

lauds, 132 

laugh, 113, 114, 222 

laugh in your sleeve, 375 

laundry, 114 

lava, 225 

law-abiding, 63 

lawn-fete, 208 

lay, 281 

lay-reader, 132 

lead, 281 

leader, 117, 127 

leaderette, 127 

leading-article, 117, 127 

leads, 119, 120 

lean, 281 

leap, 281 

leapt, 247 

learn, 281, 289 

leatherette, 193 

leatherneck, 380 

leberwurst, 106 

leery, 317 

left-luggage-room, 118, 130 
leg, 225 

legal-holiday, 118, 130 
16gion d'honneur, 256 
legislate, 62 
lend, 281 

lengthy, 51, 62, 161 
leniency, 64 
lent, 281 

lep, 109, 281, 287 
let it slide, 96 
letter-box, 118 
letter-carrier, 27, 118, 121, 
165 

levee, 104, 256 
liable, 317 
liberty-cabbage, 207 
lib’ry, 325 
licensed-trade, 125 
licensed-victualler, 125 
lie, 281 

lieutenant, 227 

lift, 117, 172 

lift-man, 117 

lift up, 200 

light, 281 

lighter, 119 

ligbtning-bug, 58 

light out, 96, 199 

like greased lightning, 375 

likely, 70, 317 

likety-split, 57 


limb, 152 
limehouse, 196 
limited, 100, 145 
limited liability company, 
125 

line, 100, 118, 119 

lineage-rates, 127 

linen-draper, 27n 

listerine, 201 

lit, 285 

liter, 229 

literary, 218 

literatus, 91 

littler, 316 

littlest, 316 

liturgy, 132 

live-oak, 58 

liver, a., 316 

liverwurst, 106 

livest, 200 

live-wire, 15 

living, 132 

living-room, 121 

loaded, 103 

loaf, n.j 106 

loaf, v. 3 106 

loafer, 106 

loan, v., 198 

loan-office, 146 

loan-shark, 196 

lobby, v., 101 

lobby-agents, 101 

lobby-display, v. 3 198 

lobbyist, 101 

lobster, 161. 197 

locate, 62, 63 

loco, 97, 104 

locomobile, 202 

locomotive, 102 

locomotive-engineer, 118 

locum tenens, 132 

locust, 58 

log-cabin, 59n 

log-house, 59 

logroll, v„ 57 

lonesome, 200 

long-distance-call, 118 

long-primer, 134 

long-vacation, 185 

loophole, 69 

loose, 281 

loot, 379 

lord, 218 

lose, 281 

lot, 64 

lounge, 125 

lounge-lizard, 196 

lounge-suit, 125 

love-nest, 193 

love-pirate, 193 

low-down, 45 

low-flung, 97 

low-lid, 373n 

lowly, 314 

Ltd., 126 

luggage, 27, 116 

luggage-van, 100, 116 

lumber, 65, 118 

lumber-jack, 66 

lumber-yard, 66, 118 

lunch, 122 

luncheon, 192 

lynch, 95, 164 

lysol, 201 

machine, 101, 118, 127 
mackinaw, 54 
mad, 118 
madame, 150, 259 
mad-dog, 97 
mad-house, 97 


mad-money, 373n 
maffick, 196 
magazine, 216 
mahoganized, 146 
maid, 171 
mail, n., 121, 166 
mail-box, 121 
mail-clerk, 100 
mail-order, 121 
mail-train, 121 
mail-van, 121 
maize, 54, 117 
major, v., 198 
make, 281 
make a kick, 96 
make good, 161, 169 
make the fur fly, 96 
make tracks, 96 
male-cow, 151 
Mamie Taylor, 102 
mamma, 216 
managing-director, 126 
maneuver, 231 
mangelwurzel, 128 
manitee, 54 
mannerchor, 107 
manoeuvre, 231 
mare, 150, 151 
marsh, 128 
mass, 113 
massive, 113 
mass-meeting, 98, 101 
master, 113, 124, 223 
matinee, 256 
matins, 132, 173 
matron, 147 
matter, 113 
matzoth, 205, 327 
maverick, 98 
may, 281 
mazuma, 205 
mean, 281 
medicine-man, 54 
medieval, 230 
meet, 281 

melancholy, 172, 218n 
mgl4e, 256 
memo, 190 

memorandum-book, 130 
menhaden, 53 
men higher up, 127 
menu, 207, 327 
mesa, 104 
mesdame, 259 
messieurs, 259 
metal, 116 
metals, 100 
meter, 229 
Methodist, 118, 133 
mews, 59 
Michaelmas, 135 
mick, 341 
might’a, 281 
mileage, 63, 100 
mileage-book, 100 
milk-shake, 169 
mill, 60 
milligram, 245 
minerals, 102, 119 
minim, 134 
mining-regions, 128 
minion, 134 
minion-nonpareil, 134 
minister, 132 
ministry, 126 
minor-leaguer, 130 
minster, 132 
minuet, 327 
mirage, 225 
missionate, 91, 94 


478 


LIST OF WORDS AND PHRASES 


mixologist, 201 
mob, 189 
mobiloil, 202 
moccasin, 54 
moccasin-snake, 58 
molasses, 10, 69, 118 
mold, 229 
mollusk, 231 
molt, 229, 283 
money-bund. 206 
monitor, 173 
monkey-nut, 118, 129 
monkey-wrench, 118 
monoplane, 249 
Montana, 225 
moon-shine, 103 
moor, 59, 125, 128 
moose, 53. 128 
•moral, 225 
mortgage-shark, 98 
mortician. 28, 145 
moron, 203 
mossback, 60 
motor, 129 
motor-car, 129 
mould, 229 
moult, 229 
moustache, 229 
movie, 37, 118, 169, 182, 
190 

movie-fiend, 200 
mow, 281 
Mrs., 67 
mucker, 45 
muck-raker, 45, 371 
mud-hen, 5S 
mud-scow, 60 
mufti, 125 
mugwump, 101 
mum, 190 
mush, 59 

music-hall, 119, 125, 208. 

muskrat, 162 

muslin, 256 

muss, 69, 95, 324 

mustache, 229 

mustang, 104 

mutt, 190, 197 

mutton, 146 

muzhik, 256 

nabisco, 202 

naive, 257 

naivety. 256, 257 

naphtha, 219 

nasty, 174, 314 

nature, 115 

nature-faker, 196, 371 

naught, 230 

naughty. 314 

navvy, 118 

near, 34 

near-accident, 46 
near-beer, 193 
near-silk, 33, 193. 313 
necessarily, 172, 218 
neck, 58 
necker, 373n 
necktie, 118 
n6e, 327 
negative, v., 62 
neighbor, 228 
neither, 115 
neolin. 201 
nephew, 219 
nest-of-drawers, 117 
net, 229 
Nevada, 225 
news-agent, 118 
news-dealer, 118 
newspaper-man, 118 


N. G., 33 
nib, 118 
nice, 317, 371 
nice-girl, 373n 
nickel-in-the-slot, 178 
nigger in the woodpile, 127 
night-rider, 45 
nine-pins, 119, 131 
nineteenth-hole, 132 
niter, 232 

nix, 206 

nix come erous, 107 
nixie, 206n 
nixy, 206 
no-account, 57, 61 
nobby, 224 
no-how, 57, 61 
non-committal, 96, 164 
nonconformist, 132 
nonconformist - conscience, 
134 

nonpareil, 134 
non-stop-train, 117 
noodle, 56, 106 
nor, 320 
no-siree, 110 
notch, 58 
notify, 65, 135 
notions, 118 
not on your life, 110 
nought, 230 
noways, 315 
nuptial-ceremony, 149 
nursing-home, 117, 122 
nursing-sister, 122 
nursing the constituency, 
126 

nut, 371 

obligate, 61, 94, 164 
obsequies, 149 
ocelot, 54 
octoroon, 56 
odontologist, 145 
odor, 228 
oecology, 239 
oecumenical. 230 
oedema, 230 
oesophagus, 230 
offal, 69 
offense, 231 

office-holder, 37, 118, 124 

offices, 118 

office-seeker, 101 

off'n, 320 

often, 218 

oh, oh ! 136 

oi-yoi, 205 

O. K„ 33. 194 
okeh, 195 

old boy, 173 
old dear, 174 
old top, 172 
oleo, 190 

oleomargarine, 146 
omnibus-bill, 101, 127, 376 
onc’t, 109, 325 
one another, 184 
one best bet, 182 
one-horse, 61, 197 
onery, 36, 109 
on his legs, 127 
on the bench, 130 
on the bum, 107 
on the fence, 101 
on the Fritz, 107 
on-the-hoof, 98 
on the job, 170, 182 
on the Q. T„ 195 
on the rates, 125 
on tiptoe, 23 


on to his curves, 130 
open up, 199 
operate, 199 
opossum, 53 
oppose, 61 
orangeade, 201 
orate, 191 
orchestra. 118, 125 
order, 127 
oslerize, 197 
ossified, 103 
ostent, 91 
ostler, 231 
ouch, 107 
ought'a. 296 
ourn. 300 
outbuildings, 118 
outfit, 379 
out-house, 164 
out on parole, 373n 
over, 182 
overcoat, 165 
overhalls, 326 
overhead-expenses, 28 
over his signature, 136 
overshoes, 129 
oyster-stew, 128 
oyster-supper, 98, 128 
package, 118 
padrone, 207 
paint the town red, 96 
pajamas, 231 
pale-face, 54 
palm, 223 
Palmerism, 193 
palmetto, 56 
palmolive, 201 
pan, v., 198 
panel-house, 45 
pan-fish, 59 
panhandle, v., 28 
pan out. 96, 163 
pantry. 113 
pants, 130, 162 
papa, 216 
papoose, 54 
paprika, 206 
par, 127 
paraffin, 117 
parcel, 118 

parcels-room, 118, 130 
pard, 190 

parental-school, 149 
paresis, 216 

parlor. 118. 121, 125, 228 
parlor-car. 45, 118 
parson, 132 
partiolist, 91 
partridge, 65 
pass, 114 
passage, 368 
passage-way, 45 
pass-degree, 124 
passenger-coach, 100 
pastor, 113, 132 
path, 114, 172, 222 
patriot, 225 
patrolman, 28, 45, 118 
patter, 1S9 

pavement, 18n, 119, 129 
pawn-shop, 146, 178 
paw-paw, 53 
pay, 281 
pay-day, 165 
pay-dirt, 45, 98 
paying-guest, 120, 145 

P. D. Q„ 33, 194 
pea, 95n 
peach, 161, 375 
peacharino, 203 


LIST OF WORDS AND PHRASES 


479 


pea-nut, 58, 118, 128 
peanut-politics, 129 
pearl, 134 
pearline, 201 
peart, 97 
pecan, 53 
ped, 283 
pedagog, 251 
peg, 225 

peeve, v., 181, 191 
peewee, 56 
pemmiean, 54 
pen, 190 

pendulum, v., 198 
pennant-winner, 130 
penny, 178 
penny-ante, 131, 178 
penny-arcade, 178 
penny-bill, 60 
penny-dreadful, 117 
penny-in-the-slot, 178 
peon, 104 
peonage, 104 
pen-point, 118 
pep, 190 
peptomint, 201 
per, 209 

perambulator, 166 
per-diem, 101 
period, 118 

permanent-official, 125 

permanent-way, 100, 118 

persimmon, 53, 128 

pesky, 71 

peter out, 96 

petrol, 117, 166 

pkenix, 232 

phial, 230 

phlegm-cutter, 103 

phone, n., 190 

phone, v., 181 

phone me, 121 

phoney, 182, 203 

photo, n., 182 

photo, v., 191 

phychopathic-hospital, 150 

P. I„ 153 

pianist, 216 

pianola. 201 

pica, 134 

picayune, 97. 104, 125 
pickaninny, 56, 393 
picket, 230 
picturedom, 193 
pictures, 118 
picturize, 197 
pie, 65, 118 
pie-counter, J.01 
piffled, 103 
pifflicated, 103 
piggery, 117 
pigmy, 231 
pike, 190 
piker, 197 
pillar-box, 118, 121 
pill-box, 379 
pimp, 153 
pinch-hitter, 130 
pine-knot, 59 
pin-head. 156, 181, 183 
pint, 125 
pipe-hospital, 201 
pipe-of-peace, 54 
piquet, 230 
pisen, 322 
pit, 56 
pitcher, 118 
pitch-pine, 58 
placate, 61, 164 
place, 368 


placer, 104 

plain, 165, 361 

plane, 190 

plank, 101 

plank down, 96 

platform, 101, 165 

plate, 119 

play ball, 130 

played-out, 96 

play for a sucker, 181 

play possum, 96 

plaza, 104, 327 

plead, 281 

plebe, 190 

pled, 284 

plough, n., 100, 117, 230 
plow, 230 
plug along, 394 
plumb, 97, 191 
plunder-bund, 206 
pluralist, 132 
plute, 190 

Plymouth Brethren, 134 
pocketbook, 130 
podgy, 230 
poem, 226 
points, 100, 119 
poker, 112 
poke-weed, 58 
polack, 342 
pomato, 192 
poncho, 104 

pond, 58 

pone, 54 

pony up, 131, 199 
pooldoo, 209 
poorhouse, 118, 124 
pop, 190 
pop-concert, 190 
popcorn, 27, 59 

S y-cock, 98 
ir-priced, 146 
porgy, 53 
pork, 197 

pork-barrel, 101, 127, 182 
porridge, 116, 125 
portage, 55, 104 
porte-cochfere, 256 
porter, 118, 130 
porti&re, 256 
Portugee, 315 
post, n., 121, 166 
post-free, 118, 121 
postman, 118, 121 
post-paid, 118, 121 
possum, 190 
postum, 201 
pot, 131 
potato-bug, 58 
poteen, 108 
potpie, 118 
practical, 113 
prairie, 52, 55, 104 
prairie-schooner, 98 
praline, 209 
prebendary, 132 
preceptor, 173 
precinct, 101 
precis, 256 
predicate, 95 
prefect, 123, 173 
preferred. 218 
prelude, 327 
premiere, 327 
prepaid, 118, 121 
prep-school, 122, 190 
presentation, 132 
president, 124, 146 
presidential, 63, 164 
presidio, 104, 209 


prespiration, 326 
press, 118 
press-agent, v., 198 
pressman, 118, 127 
press-representative, 146 
pretense, 231 
pretty, 225 
pretzel, 106 
Preussen, 343n 
preventable-disease, 154 
prickly-heat, 59 
primarily, 216 
primary, 101 
primate, 132 
Prince-Albert, 15 
principal, 124 
printery, 192 
private-detective, 130 
private-enquiry-agent, 130 
private-soldier, 117 
probate, 128 
probe, n„ 193 
pro’bition, 325 
prob’ly, 325 
process, 224n 
produce, 224n 
prof, 190 
professor, 139 
program, n., 25, 118, 229 
program, v., 198 
progress, v., 51, 61, 95 
project, 224n 
prolog, 229, 251 
prom, 190 
promenade, 116 
promulge, 91 
pronto, 169 
propaganda, v., 181 
prophet, 224 
proposition, 136 
prosit, 107 
protectograph, 201 
prove, 281 
provost, 124, 224n 
psalm, 223 
psycho-neurosis, 149 
pub, 125 
publicist, 146 
public-comfort-station, 152 
public-company, 125 
public-school, 118, 122 
public-house, 118, 125 
public-servant, 118, 124 
publishment, 94 
pudgy, 230 
puff-puff, 122 
pull, 101, 127 
pull up stakes, 96 
pull wool over his eyes, 96 
pumpernickel, 106 
pumpkin, 219 
pung, 60 
pungy, 60, 131 
punk, 379 
punt, 131 

purchasing-agent, 146 
purse, 130 
push, 394 
pussy-footed, 182 
put, 281 

put a bug in his ear, 96 

put it down, 121 

put over, 199 

pygmy, 231 

pyjamas, 231 

quad, 173 

quadroon, 56 

quaff, 113 

quahaug, 54 

quarantine-flag, 151 


480 


LIST OF WORDS AND PHRASES 


quarrel, 225 
quarter-day, 135 
quaver, 134 
questionize, 94 
queue, 125 
quien sabe, 209 
quinine, 226 
quit, 281 
quite, 135, 137 
quitter, 15 
quoit, 323 

quotation-marks, 118 
rabbit, 66 
raccoon, 53 
racing-dope, 112 
radish, 225 
ragamuffin, 69 
rail, 100 
railroad, n., 118 
railroad, v., 100 
railroadman, 100, 118 
rails, 118 
railway, 118 
railway-rug, 100 
railway-servant, 118 
raise, 135, 281 
ram, 151, 223 
rambunctious, 99, 165 
ranch, n., 104 
ranch, v., 104 
ranch-house, 104 
ranchman. 104 
rancor, 228 
rapids, 52, 58, 104 
rare, 165, 324 
ratepayer, 119, 124 
rates, 119, 124 
rather, 114 
rathskeller, 106, 327 
rattle, v., 198 
rattler, 190 
razor-back, 58 
read, 281 

read for holy orders, 132 
read the law, 122 
ready, v., 191 
ready-made, 146 
ready-tailored, 146 
ready-to-put-on, 146 
ready-to-w T ear, 146 
real, 225, 314 
real-estate agent, 27 
really, 314 
realtor, 145 
recall, 127 
receipts, 118 
recess, 216 
rector, 124, 132, 146 
red-eye, 103 
red Indian, 117 
red-light-district, 153 
reed-bird. 58 
reel of cotton, 121 
refresher. 128 
regime, 256 
regular, 101 
regular-guy, 155 
reformatory, 149 
reform-school, 149 
releasement, 94 
reliable, 38. 63, 161 
reminisce, 181, 191 
remove, 123, 173 
rench,109, 281, 324 
renig, 198 
rep, 190 

repeater, 101, 127 
repertoire, 256 
reptile, 226 
resinol, 201 


resolute, v„ 95, 181 
restaprant, 146 
resurrect, 34, 95 
retainer, 128 
retiracy, 94 
retiring-room, 152 
return-ticket, 118, 125 
reunion, v., 198 
Rev., 144 
revue, 207 

Rhine-wine, 118, 121 

rickey, 102 

rid, 281 

ride, 281 

ridiculosity, 91 

riffle. 58, 192 

right, adv., 34, 137 

right honourable, 139 

right o, 24 

right-of-way, 100 

rigor, 228 

rile, 182. 281, 322 

rime, 232 

ring, 281 

ring me up, 121 

rinse, 281n 

rise, 135, 281 

ritualism, 132 

ritz, 373n 

riz, 281 

road-agent, 15 

road-bed, 118 

road-louse, 196 

road-mendor, 118 

road-repairer, 118 

roast, n., 118 

roast, v., 198 

roasting-ear, 59 

rob, 224 

rock, n., 65 

roil, 281n 

rOle, 256 

roll, 118 

roll-call, 118 

roller-coaster, 95 

rolling-country, 58 

romance, 216 

romanzo, 91 

roodle, 131 

room, v., 62 

roorback, 101 

rooster, 27n, 118, 151 

rooter, 130 

rope in, 96 

Roquefort, 327 

rough-house, 33 

rough-neck, 98 

roundsman, 125 

round-trip, 100 

round-trip-ticket, 118, 125 

round-up, 98 

’rous mit ’im, 107 

roustabout, 98 

rowdy, 376 

rubber neck, 15, 33 

rube, 15, 190 

rubbers, 129 

ruby, 134 

ruby-nonpareil, 134 
Rugby, 131 
rugger, 131 
Rumania, 256 
rum-dumb, 108 
rumor, 228 

run, n., 100, 126, 128, 281 
run, v., 101, 137 
run-in, 199 

run into the ground, 96 
run slow, 187 
rutabaga, 128 


ruz, 283 
Sabbaday, 190 
sabe, 104 
sachem, 54 
sacrilege, v., 198 
sagamore, 54 
St. Martin’s summer, 117 
salesgirl, 143 
saleslady, 143 
saleswoman, 118, 143 
salmon, 223 
saloon, 27, 103, 118 
saloon-carriage, 118 
saloon-keeper, 103 
salt-lick, 59 
saltwater-taffy, 15 
saltpeter, 229 
Salt river, 127 
salvage, v., 380 
samp, 54 

sample-room. 28, 103 

sangerfest, 107 

Santa Claus, 56 

sapolio, 201 

sarge, 380 

sashay, 326 

sass, 109 

sassy, 323 

satisfaction, 113 

sauerkraut, 56, 106, 258 

saunter, 114 

savagerous, 94 

savor, 228 

saw wood, 62 

say, 281 

scab, 15, 161 
scalawag, 99, 165 
scallywampus, 99n, 203 
scalp, 162 
scarcely, 314 
scarfpin, 165 
scary, 34, 97 
sceptic, 231 
schadchen, 205 
schedule, 76 
scenarioize, 197 
scherzo, 327 
sclock, 207n 
schnitzel, 106 
schooner, 60, 103, 125 
schiitzenfest, 107 
Schwaben, 343n 
schweizer, 106, 327 
scientist, 38 
scimetar, 230 
scimitar, 230 
scott, 95 

scow, 56, 119, 131 
scowegian, 342 
scrap, 162 
scrape, 99 
scrimp, 71 
serumdifferous, 99n 
scrumptious, 99 
sculp, 191 
scuppernong, 53 
seafood-dinner, 128 
Sears-Roebuck, 379 
season-ticket, 117 
secesh, 192 
second-hand, 146 
secretary, 127, 172, 218 
see, 281 

see the elephant, 96 
seen, 283 
segar, 254 
seidel, 107 
selectman, 59 
self. 310 
sell, 281 


LIST OF WORDS AND PHRASES 


481 


semibreve, 134 

semidemisemiquaver, 134 

semi-occasional, 38, 99, 164 

semi-quaver, 134 

send, 281 

senior, 124 

senior-prom, 124 

septicemia. 230 

serape, 209 

Serbia, 256 

serious-charge, 152 

servant, 120 

service, v., 198 

servile, 226 

set, 281 

Seventh Day Adventist, 
134 

sewerage, 119 
seyd, 256 
shack, 15 
shaikh, 256 
shake, 281 
shall, 184, 277, 295 
sha’n’t, 222, 296 
shanty, 104 
share, 126 

shareholder, 119, 126 
shares, 119 
shave, 281 
shebang, 111 
shed, 282 
shell, 103 
shellacked, 374 
shell-road, 59 
sherry-cobbler, 102 
shew, 231 
shillelah, 108 
shilling, 178n 
shimmy, 208 
shin, v., 62 
shine, v., 282 
shingle, n., 59 
shingle, v., 61 
shinola, 201 
shirt, 151 

shirtwaist, 119, 121 
shoe. 27n, 65, 119, 171, 
282 

shoemaker, 119 
shoe-shine, 119 
shoestring, 119 
shoe-tree, 119 
shoo-fly, 377 
shoot, 282 
shooting, 117, 136 
shoot-the-chutes, 196 
shop, 65, 125, 171, 178 
shop-assistant, 118 
shop-fittings, 119 
shop-girl, 178 
shot-gun, 98 
shoplifter, 178 
shopper, 178 
shopping, 178 
shop-walker, 117, 146 
shop-worn, 178 
should’ve, 320 
show, 231, 282 
show-down, 199 
show up, 199 
shrub, 102 
shuck, 61, 290 
shunt, 100, 119 
shut out, 130 
shyster, 28, 107 
siamesed, 198 
sick, 10, 69, 119, 150 
side-stepper, 15 
side-swfpe, v., 100 
side-track, v., 100 


sidewalk, 15, 60, 119, 129 
sidewalk, 18n 
sierra, 104 
sight-seeing-car, 119 
silk-stockings, 127 
silver, 119 
silver-fizz, 28 

simp, 190 

sing, 282 
sink, 282 
siphon, 231 
sit. 282 

sitting-room, 121 
skedaddle, 99, 164 
skeptic, 231 
skibby, 342 
skiddoo, 110 
skin, v., 102, 282 
skookum, 207 
skun, 282, 284 
skunk, 162, 197 
slack, v., 371 
slacker, 371, 376 
slam the pill, 377 
slang, 282 
slanguage, 192 
slate, 101 
sled, 119 
sledge, 119 
sleek, 226 
sleep, v., 34, 282 
sleeper, 100, 117, 190 
sleigh. 52, 119 
slep, 287 
sleuth, 28 
slick, 226, 323 
slick up, 71 
slide, 282 
slightly-used, 146 
slim, 97 
sling, n., 102 
sling, v., 282 
slip, n., 63 
slipper, 65 
slit, 282 
sliver, 226 
slog, 230 
slopped, 103 
slosh, 230 
slumgullion, 99 
slug, v., 230 
slush, 230 
small-pearl 134 
small-pica, 134 
small-potatoes, 98 
small-wares, 118 
smash, n., 102 
smearcase, 56, 258 
smell, 282 
smith, 200 
smithereens, 108 
smoke-eater, 374 
smoker, 190 
smoke-room, 119 
smoking-room, 119 
smote, 283 
snake, 127 
snake-fence, 98 
sneak, 282 
snew, 284 
snicker, 71, 231 
snigger, 231 
snitz, 107 
snoop, 62 
snooted, 103 
snow-plow, 59 
snuck, 282 
soap-boxer, 148, 193 
sob-sister, 196 
soccer, 131 


social-disease, 152 
sockdolager, 99 
sock-suspenders, 117, 121 
sodalicious, 203 
soda-mint, 201 
soft-drinks, 102, 119 
soiree, 256 
solicitor, 127 
solid, 63 

sombrero, 15, 104 
some, 138 
someone else’s, 311 
somewhere, 188 
somewheres, 315 
son-of-a-bitch. 156 
son-of-a-gun, 156 
soph, 190 

sophomore, 59, 124 

sos, 198 

sot, 281 n 
soul-mate, 193 
sound, 128 
souper, 256 
sour, 102 
sour-braten, 106n 
soused. 103 

sow, 151 

sox, 255 
spa, 225 
spaghetti, 207 
spalpeen, 108 
span, n., 56 
spanner, 118 
speak-easy, 103 
speaking-tour, 126 
spearmint, 201 
specialing, 198 
specialty, 261 
specie, 315 
speck, 107 
speed, 282 
speeder, 289 
speed-limit, 289 
speed-mania, 289 
speedway, 367 
spell, 282 
spelling-bee, 60 
spick, 342 

spiel, 327 
spieler, 111 
spigot. 119 
spiggoty, 342 
spill, 282 
spin, 282 
spit, 282 

spittoon, 129, 146 
splendiferous. 203 
splendor, 228 
splinter-bar, 119 
split a ticket, 101 
split one’s sides, 110 
split-ticket, 127 
splurge, n., 95 
splurge, v., 95 
spoil, 282 
spondulix, 99, 164 
sponge, 119 
spoof, 155 
spool, 118 

spool of thread, 121 
spread-eagle, 98 
spread one’s self, 96 
spring, 282 
square, 129 
square-head, 341 
square-meal, 98, 164 
squash, 53, 190 
squat, 64 
squatter, 52 
squaw, 54, 162 


482 


LIST OF WORDS AND PHRASES 


squaw-man, 103 
squinch, 324 
squirrel, 227 
squirrel-whiskey, 103 
stag, a., 15 
stag-party, 98, 164 
stallion, 151 
stalls, 118, 125 
stalwart, 101 
stamp, 114, 324 
stampede, 56 
stamping-ground, 60 
stanch, 229 
standee, 45n 
stand pat, 131, 194 
stand-patter, 196 
standpoint, 38, 63, 108, 

164 

stang, 282 
start-off, 199 
start off, v., 199 
statehouse, 59 
statler-operated, 198 
statutory-offense, 152 
staunch, 229 
stay put, 199 
steal, n„ 193 
steal, v., 282 
steam-roller, n., 127, 372 
steam-roller, v., 199 
stegnosis, 230 
stein, 107 

stem-winder, 37, 119 
stenog, 190 
stenosis, 230 
steward, 126 
stewed, 103 

stick, 103, 116, 130, 171 
sting, 282 
stink, 282 
stinkibus, 102 
stirrup, 227 
stock, 69, 126, 224 
stock-broker, 126 
stock-holder, 119 
stocking-feet, 98 
stocks, 119, 126 
stogie, 125 
stomach, 150, 152 
stomp, 324 
stone, 134 
stone-fence, 102 
stone-ginger, 102n 
stone-wall, 102 
stoop, 56 
stop-over, n., 100, 199 
stop over, v., 199 
stopped, 136 
store, 65 
store-clothes, 98 
store-fixtures, 119 
stores, 117, 120, 121 
story, 229 
strafe, 196. 379 
straight. 103 
straight-ticket, 101 
street-cleaner, 119, 124 
street-railway, 119 
street-walker, 153 
stricken out, 128 
strike, 282 
strike-breaker, 373n 
strike it rich, 96 
strike out, 130 
string, 130 

strong-arm squad, 125 
struck out, 127 
stud, 117 

study for the ministry, 132 
stuffers, 127 


stump, v., 34, 57, 62, 163 

stump-oratory, 163 

stumping-trip, 126 

stunt. 161 

sub, 190 

subaltern. 125 

sub-deb, 194 

submarine, 380 

subway, 165 

succor, 228 

succotash, 54 

sucker, 151, 161 

suffragan, 132 

sugar, 161 

sulfite, 232 

sulfur, 254 

summer-time, 117, 130 
summon, 315 
sundae, 45n, 201 
Sunday, 194 
supawm, 54 
supergobsloptious, 203 
supergobosnoptious, 99n 
supertax, 129 
sure, adv., 46, 187, 313 
surprize, 232 
surtax, 129 

suspenders, 27n, 99, 119, 

121 

swagger, 174 
swamp, 128 
swang, 282 
swatch, 207n 
swat-fest, 206 
swear, 282 
swear off, 163 
sweater, 165 
Swedes, 122 
sweep, 282 
sweet-potato, 58, 128 
sweets, 116, 121, 130 
swell, 282 
swelldoodle, 203 
swep, 287 
swim, 282 
swing, 282 
swingle-tree. 69 
switch, n., 100, 119 
switch, v., 100, 119 
switching-engine, 100 
switchman, 100 
switch-yard, 100 
swole, 288 
syphilis, 153 
syphon, 231 
syrup, 227 
tabernacle, 133 
table, v., 61 
table-tapping, 165n 
taffy, 230 
tailor-made, 121 
take, 282 

take a back seat, 96 
take silk, 128 
take to the woods, 62 
takings, 118 
talented, 161 
talk-fest, 206 

talk through your hat, 375 

tamale, 104 

tangle-foot, 169 

tanked, 103 

tap, 119 

tapioca, 54 

tariff reform, 126 

tarn, 59 

tarnal. 156, 326 
tarnation. 156 
tassel, 223 
tasteful, 187 


tasty, 34, 38, 187, 200 

tavern, C6 

taxes, 119 

taxi, v., 191 

tax-paid, 182 

taxpayer, 119 

T. B.. 195 

tea, 122 

teach, 282 

team, 64 

tear, 282 

teetotaler, 99 

telegraph-blank, 130 

telegrapher, 216 

telegraph-form, 130 

telescoped, 163 

tell, 282 

temporary, 218 

temporarily, 216 

tender, 116 

tenderfoot, 98, 165 

tenderloin, 119, 121, 197 

ten-pins, 119, 131 

tepee, 54 

terrapin, 53, 128 

tete-ft-tgte, 256 

Thanksgiving, 135 

that, 302, 304 

that-a way, 321 

thatn, 302 

that-there, 302 

theater, 229 

theirn, 300 

theirselves, 310 

them, 302 

them-there, 302 

thence, 315 

thermos, 201 

these, 302 

these-here, 302 

thesen, 302 

These States, 91 

thin, 282 

think, n., 200, 282 
thinnen, 282n 
third-degree, 125 
this, 302 
this-here, 302 
thisn, 302 
thither, 315 
tho, 251 
thon, 192 
thorofare, 251 
thoroly, 251 
those, 302 
thosen, 302 
thrash. 324 
three-of-a-kind, 131 
thrive, 282 
throw, 282 
throwed, 284 
thru, 251 
thruout, 251 
thumb-tack, 119 
thunk, 282n 
thusly, 314 
ticket-office, 100, 119 
ticket-scalper, 98, 100 
tickler. 99 
tie, 100, 118 
tight-wad, 196 
timber-yard, 118 
tin, 116, 120 
tin-horn, 196 
tinker, 119 
tin-Lizzie, 181 
tinned-goods, 116 
tinner, 119 
tin-roof, 119 
tiptoe, v., 23, 191 


LIST OF WORDS AND PHRASES 


483 


tire, 231 
tiz, 202 

toboggan, 54, 162 
toe the mark, 23 
toffy, 230 
toggery, 192 
toilet, 152, 220, 229 
tole, 288 

tomahawk, n u 54, 393 
tomahawk, v., 61 
Tom-and-Jerry, 102 
tomato, 104, 223, 374 
Tom-Collins, 102 
tong, 112 

tonsorial-parlor, 146 
tony, 38, 99, 200 
tooken, 292 
top-hat, 171 
top-liner, 117, 125 
topping, 174 
tornada, 104, 128 
torry, 119 
tote, 62 

tough, 161, 394 
towards, 187 
towerman, 100 
town, 364 
track, 119 
track-walker, 100 
tractor, 201 

tradesmen’s-entrance, 171 

traffic, n., 174 

trail, n., 59 

trail, v., 61 

train-boy, 100 

trained-nurse, 119, 164 

tram, 125 

tram-car, 119 

tramp, 161 

tramway, 119 

transom, 119 

trapee, 315 

trash, 69 

traveler, 229 

travelogue, 192 

treacle, 118, 125 

tread, 282 

tripos, 124 

tripper, 100 

triscuit, 202 

trolley-car, 119 

truck, 100, 119 

true-blue, 96 

trunk-call, 28, 118 

trust-buster, 376 

trustification, 181 

trustify, 181 

try, 191 

try-out, n., 191 

try out, v., 199 

tsar, 231, 256 

tub, v., 171, 174 

tuberculogian, 201 

tumor, 228 

tune the old cow died of, 
110 

turbot, 128 
turkey-gobbler, 58 
turn-down, n., 199 
turn down, v., 199, 394 
turn-verein, 107 
twelve-month, 135 
twic’t, 325 
twine, 130 
two-fer, 96 
typewrite, 191 
typewriter, 119, 121 
typist. 119, 121 
tyre, 231 
uhrgucker, 108n 


ukase, 256 
under-brush, 58 
under-cut, 119, 121 
under-done, 165 
underground, 165 
underpinned, 63 
underpinning, 69 
undershirt, 119, 130 
under-the-weather, 98, 128 
uneeda, 201 
union, 125 
uniquer, 316 
unit, 60 

United Brethren, 134 
university, 146 
unloosen, 281n, 282 
unmarried-mot/heri, 149 
unwell, 155 
up, 193, 199 
up against, 162 
uplift, 134 
up-state, 34, 128 
up-street, 193 
up-train, 129 
usen’t, 320 
ush, v., 191 
usher, 124 
usherette, 193 
vacation, v., 198 
vacationize, 197 
vag, 190 
valor, 228 

vamose, v., 104, 209 
vamp, n., 190 
vamp, v., 191, 376 
van, 116, 189 
vapor, 228 
varsity, 173 
vase, 114, 223 
vaseline, 201 
vaudeville, 207, 327 
vaudeville-theatre, 119 
venereal, 154 
veranda, 229 
verger, 132 
vest, 119, 130 
vestry, 126 
vial, 230 
vicar, 132 
vice, 231 

vice-chancellor, 124 
vice-disease, 153 
victrola, 201 
vigilante, 104 
vigor, 228 
violet, 226 
virgin, 154 
vise, 231 
vivii, 202 
vodvil, 254 
voodoo, 56 
voting-paper, 127 
voyageur, 55 
vrille, 380 
waffle, 56 
waggon, 116 
wagon, 108, 229 
wain, 59 

waistcoat, 119, 130 
wake, 282 
walk, 368 

walking the hospitals, 
122 

walk-out, n., 160_ 
walk out, v., 135 
walk-up, n. 130 
walk-up-apartment, 130n 
wally, 374 
wampum, 54 
wan, 283, 290 


wanderlust, 107 
wangle, 170, 196 
want-ad, 191 
warden, 119, 124 
warder, 119 
ward-executive, 125 
ward-heeler, 127 
wardman, 125 
war-paint, 54 
war-path, 54 
warphan, 203 
wash-basin, 164 
wash-hand-basin, 164 
wash - hand - stand, 119, 
164 

wash-out, 25 
wash-rag, 119 
wash-stand, 27, 119, 164 
wassermann, v., 198 
waste-basket, 119 
waste-paper-basket, 119 
watch-glass, 117 
water, v., 163 
water-gap, 58 
water-pitcher, 27 
watershed, 58 
water-wagon, 33 
way-bill, 100 
W. C„ 153n 
weald, 59 
wear, 282 
weasel, 374 
wed, 193 
week-end, 125 
weep, 282 
weir, 131 
wellest, 316 
well-fixed, 137 
well-heeled, 97 
well-posted, 96 
weltpolitik, 256 
weltschmerz, 256 
wep, 287 

Wesleyan, 118, 133 
wet, w„ 28, 283 
what, 304 
whatdyecallem, 375 
what’ell, 156 
wheatlet, 201 
wheat-pit, 98 
whence, 315 
where’bouts, 315 
which, 304 
whichn, 304 
whip, 171 
whippletree, 119 
whiskey-and-soda, 102 
whiskey-daisy, 102 
whiskey-sour, 28 
white-plush, 102 
white-slave, 153 
whitewash, v., 62 
white-wings, 120 
whither, 315 
whizz-bang, 379 
who, 185, 304, 305 
whole-souled, 96 
whom, 185, 305 
whose, 304 
whosen, 304 
wie gent’s, 107 
Wienerwurst, 106 
wier, 59 
wig, 189 
wigwam, 54 
wild-cat, 98 
will, 184, 277, 295 
wimpus, v., 198 
win, 283 
wind, 283 


484 


LIST OF WORDS AND PHRASES 


wind-sucker, 374 
wind-up, n., 199 
wind up, v., 199 
winned, 290 
wipe, 119 
wire-puller, 101 
wiseheimer, 206 
wish, 283 
wisht, 283 
without hardly, 320 
witness-box, 119 
witness-stand, 119 
wiz, 190 
wold, 59 
woman, 152 
won’t, 296 
woodchuck, 54 


woolen, 229 
woozy, 201 
wop, 341 

workhouse, 118, 124 
worser, 316 
would’ve, 320 
w'owser, 170 
wrangler, 124 
wrassle, 324 
wrecking-crew, 100 
wring, 283 
write, 283 
yam, 128 
Yank, n., 190 
yank, v., 95 
Yankee, 55 
yeller, 326 


yellow-back, 162 
yellow-belly, 342 
yellow-journalism, 
yen, 111 
yes-indeedy, 110 
yet, 225 
yodel, 107 
yok-a-mi, 112 
Yom Kippur, 135 
you-all, 301 
you betcha, 169 
young man, 135 
yourn, 300 
zowie, 375 
zwei, 107 
zwieback, 107 
zwei bier, 107 


165n 


INDEX 


Academie Frangaise, 5 
Adams, Franklin P., 174 
Adams, James Truslow, 67n 
Adams, John, 62, 79 
Adams, John Quincy, 61 
Ade, George, 20, 275 
Aldington, Richard, 19 
Alford, Henry, 93, 377 
American Academy of Arts and Letters, 
188 

American Dialect Society, 7 
Ames, Nathaniel, 59 
Anderson, Sherwood, 97, 396 
Andreen, Gustav, 424 
Annual Review, 50 
Anti-Jacobin Review, 5In 
Archer, William, 14, 17, 18, 39 
Armfield, H. T., 70 
Ayres, Harry Morgan, 3n, 179 

Babbitt, Eugene H., 179n, 191n, 386 
Bache, Richard Meade, 114n, 156n, 

185n 

Baker, Ernest A., 244n 
Balfour, A. J., 255 
Banche, Henri, 5 
Bardsley, Charles W., 349n 
Barranger, G. A., 26 
Barrere and Leland, 56, 112 
Bartlett, John Russell, 10, 40, 56, 90, 
104 

Bausman, Lottie M., 335n 
Beecher, Henry Ward, 94 
Belknap, Jeremy, 51 
Bennett, Arnold, 14 
Berger, Vilhelm, 356n, 424 
Bergmann, Karl, 341n 
Better Speech Week, ix 
Beverley, Robert, 53, 58 
Bible, 69 

Bicknell, Frank M., 167 
Blackwood’s Magazine, 82 
Blanco-Fombona, Rufino, 343n 
Bonaparte, L. L., 214 
Boni, Alfred, 421n 
Book of Mormon, 65n 
Boot, H. E., 186n 
Bosson, Olaf E., 370n 
Boston Evening Transcript, 25n 
Boucher, Jonathan, 49, 63 
Boucicault, Dion, 111 


Bowey, Roy P., 27 
Boyd, Stephen G., 353 
Brackebusch, W., 383 
Bradley, Henry, 244, 296, 301, 387 
Brailsford, H. N., 14, 16 
Branner, John C., 358n 
Bremer, Otto, 5 

Bridges, Robert, viii, 218n, 244, 324, 
395 

Bristed, Charles Astor, 47, 93, 137n, 
161 

British Critic, 50, 5 In, 62 
British Review, 82 
Brodhead, L. W., 363n 
Brooke, Rupert, 169 
Brooks, John Graham, 85n, 152n 
Brooks, Van Wyck, 4, 179 
Brundage, Edward J., 320n 
Bryant. William Cullen, 38n, 63, 87, 
145, 241 

Buchwald, Nathaniel, 418n 
Buehler, H. G., 384 
Burgess, Gelett, 202n 
Burr, Aaron, 101 
Burton, Richard, 22 
Butler, Samuel, 162 
Buttmann, Phillip Karl, 217 

Cahan, Abraham, 344n, 418 
Cambridge History of American Litera¬ 
ture, 47, 57, 68n, 85n 
Cambridge History of English Litera¬ 
ture, 13, 162, 219n, 260 
Canby, Henry Seidel, viii 
Canning, George, 63 
Carlyle, Thomas, 163, 334n 
Carpenter, W. H., 358n 
Carroll, Dixie, 277n 
Cary, Henry N., 158 
Cassell’s Dictionary, 39n, 159 
Century Magazine, 38n, 39n, 145 
Cestre, Charles, 29 

Chamberlain, Alex. F., 53n, 69n, 

411 

Chamberlain, Joseph, 159 
Channing, William Ellery, 51 
Charters, W. W., 271 
Chicago Tribune, 25 
Cheste.-ton, Cecil, 14, 17 
Chesterton, Gilbert K., 14, 155, 167 
Chicago Daily News, 38n, 39n 


m 


INDEX 


Christian Science Monitor, 25n, 211 
Churchill, William, 212n, 393n 
Clapin, Sylva, 43, 54n, 369n 
Clemenceau, Georges, 29 
Clemens, S. L., 20, 36, 254n, 434 
Cobb, Lyman, 114, 236, 241 
Cohan, George M., 197n 
Coit, J. Milnor, 173 
Collier, Pierce, 143 
Combs, J. H., 72n 
Connecticut Code, 64 
Concise Oxford Dictionary, 38, 39n, 
66n, 135, 159, 230n 
Congressional Globe, 92, 350n 
Congressional Record, 97, 136, 141, 181, 
248n, 311, 320 
Converse, C. C., 192n 
Cooley, Alice Woodworth, 267n 
Coolidge, Grace, 254n 
Cooper, J. Fenimore, 36, 85, 87 
Costa, A. Arbib, 42In 
Coulter, John Lee, 187n 
Cournos, John, 39In 
Coxe, A. Cleveland, 63, 161, 241 
Crane, Frank, 433 
Crane, W. W., 358, 366 
Critical Review, 50, 5 In 
Crumb, D. S., 301n 

Davis, Richard Harding, 316 
Declaration of Independence, 260 
Dennis, C. T., 394 
Dewey, John, 36 
Dialect Notes, 8 
Dickens, Charles, 137 
Dickinson, Emily, 138 
Dilnot, Frank, 35n 
Dionne, N. E., 411 
Dobson, Austin, 255 
Dorf, A. Th., 28n, 31n 
Dreiser, Theodore, 97, 217 
Drinkwater, John, 176 
Dunlap, Maurice P., 210 
Dwight, Timothy, 83 

Eclectic Review, 50, 51n 
Edinburgh Review, 50, 5In, 82 
Eliot, Thomas Dawes, 149 
Elliott, A. M., 410 
Ellis, A. J, 213 
Ellis, Havelock, 343n 
Elwyn, Alfred L., 42 
Ely, Richard T., 33 In 
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 87 
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 13 
English, 35n, 157n, 390, 394n, 435n 
Ervine, St. John, 174 
Esnault, Gaston, 381 
Espinosa, Aurelio M., 413 


European Magazine and Monthly Re¬ 
view, 50, 51n 
Everett, Edward, 83, 87 

Farmer, John S., 42, 103, 194 
Faulkner, W. G., 15, 161 
Faust, A. B., 410n 
Feipel, Louis N., 351n 
Ferrazzano, Carlo, 419 
Fislibein, Morris, 154 
Fishberg, Maurice, 343n 
Fisher, Bud, 190 
Fisher, Sydney George, 68n 
Fiske, John, 21 
Flaten, Nils, 422 
Flom, George T., 423 
Fliigel, Felix, 26 
Foreign Quarterly, 82 
Fortier, Alcee, 412n 
Fortier, Edward J., 412n 
Fowler, H. W. & F. G., 13, 185, 233n, 
310 

Fowler, William C., 9, 40, 92 
Fox, Charles James, 328 
Franklin, Benjamin, 48, 61, 63, 67, 68, 
73, 78, 236 
Franklin, James, 68 

Gannett, Henry, 353n 
Gardiner, A. C., 14, 19n 
Gayerre, Charles E. A., 412 
Geddes, James, Jr., 411 
George. W. L., 14, 146, 166 
Gepp, Edward, 70 
Gerard, W. R., 55 
Gerould, Gordon Hall, 177 
Gifford, William, 47, 82, 86 
Goddard, Harold, 138 
Gosse, Edmund, 255 
Gould, Edward S., 63, 115, 144, 188, 
242 

Gourmont, Remy de, 419 

Grandgent, C. H., 11, 73, 113, 114 

Greeley, Horace, 259 

Green, B. W., 346n 

Gregory, Augusta, 396 

Grimm, Jakob, 383 

Griswold, Rufus Wilmot, 88 

Hackett, Francis, 183 
Haldemann, S. S., 337n 
Hall, Basil, 93 
Hall, Fitzedward, 9, 38 
Hall, Prescott F., 67, 105n 
Halliwell-Phillips, J. O., 69 
Hamilton, Alexander, 62 
Hancock, Elizabeth H., 74n 
Harberton, Viscount, 255n 
Harding, W. G., 187 
Hardy, Thomas, 255 
Harris, William J., 183 


INDEX 


487 


Harrison, Frederic, 161 

Harrison, Henry, 336n 

Harrison, J. A., 412n 

Hart, Horace, 244 

Harvey, Thomas W., 266 

Hastings, B. MacDonald, 221n 

Hayden, Marie Gladys, 197n 

Hays, H. M., 409 

Head, Edmund, 185n 

Healy, J. F., 30n, 394n 

Hecker, E. A., 170, 379 

Heckwelder, John G. E., 55 

Henderson, Alice Corbin, 192n 

Hewlett, Maurice, 255 

Hiemenga, John J., 428 

Hildreth, Richard, 67n 

Hills, E. J., 317 

Hillyard, Anna Branson, 168 

Hobson-Jobson, law of, 53, 55, 258, 417 

Holmes, 0. W., 36, 113, 376 

Hosic, James F., 268 

Howe, E. W., 223 

Howells, William Dean, 21 

Hughes, Rupert, 22 

Humphrey, Seth K., 331n 

Hutchinson, Thomas, 65 

Hyde, Douglas, 396 

Hyne, C. J. Cutcliffe, 167 

Ichikawa, Sanki, 26 
Illvnoi&er Staats-Zeitung , 26 
Improved Order of Red Men, 54 
Indianapolis Star, 22 
Inge, Dean W. R., vii 
Irvine, Leigh H., 26In 
Irving, Washington, 85, 87, 102, 241 
Ives, George B., 76n, 185n 

Jackson, Andrew, 79, 194 
Jacobs, Joseph, 270 
James, Henry, 74, 188, 218, 224n 
Jefferson, Thomas, 1, 50, 60, 61, 62, 
63, 79, 235, 434 
Jeffrey, Francis, 68n 
Jeffrey, H. R., 201n 
Jepson, Edgar, 14, 17n 
Jespersen, Otto, 3n, 34, 35n, 72n, 185n, 
189, 265, 267n, 388 
Jewish Encyclopedia, 348n 
Johnson, James W., 192n, 342n 
Johnson, Samuel, 49, 235 
Johnson, Samuel, Jr., 237 
Johnston, Harry, 192 
Jones, Daniel, 186n, 213n, 218 
Joyce, P. W., 108, 18tn, 283, 302n 

Kartzke, Georg, 26 
Kellogg, Walter Guest, 264n 
Kennedy, John P., 87 
Ker, Edmund T., 353 


Ker, W. P., 255 
Kipling, Rudyard, 14, 167, 215n 
Knapp, Samuel L., 86 
Knickerbocker Magazine, 60, 280n 
Knox, Adrian, 249 

Krapp, George Philip, ix, 11, 72, 214, 
221, 274, 305, 323n, 369, 375 
Kron, R., 28 
Kuhns, L. Oscar, 337n 
Kuiper, B. K., 339n, 429n 

La Follette, Robert M., 129n 
Landor, Walter Savage, 245 
Langereis, H. H. D., 429 
Lardner, Ring W., 46, 275, 325n, 404 
Lewis, Sinclair, 277 
Lewis, Wyndham, 255n 
Lewisohn, Ludwig, 198n 
Livingston, Arthur, 207n, 419 
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 78, 85, 187n 
London Athenaeum, 18n, 19n 
London Daily Neics, 16 
London Morning Post, 19n 
London New Age, 37 
London Outlook, 19n 
London Saturday Review, viii, 19n, 
174 

London Spectator, 174 
London Sunday Express, 19n 
London Sunday Times, 19n 
London Times, 6n, 14, 35n, 185, 249, 
256 

Long, Percy W., 195n 
Longfellow, H. W., 60 
Lontos, S. S., 340n, 431 
Lossing, Benjamin, 36, 78 
Lounsbury, Thomas R., 9, 52, 73, 109n, 
115, 189, 235n, 241, 250n, 288n, 303, 
324n, 369, 395 
Low, Sidney, 14, 212 
Lowell, Amy, 185n, 280n 
Lowell, J. R., 36, 62, 71, 89, 395 
Lubbock, John, 251 
Lucas, E. V., 14, 19n 
Lutoslawski, Vincenty, 26 

McCullagh, Joseph S., 206n 
McDonald, P. B., 25n 
McFee, William, 25n 
McKenna, L. B., 343n 
McLaughlin, W. A., 34 In 
Macy, John, 25n 
Maitland, James, 369n 
Manchester Guardian, 17, 19n, 230n 
Marcy, William L., 87 
Marden, Orison Swett, 433 
Marsh, George Perkirs, 9, 185, 215 
Marshall, Archibald, 75n, 144n 
Marshall, John, 36, 61, 62 
Maryland Archives, 59 


488 


INDEX 


Massachusetts Spy, 05 
Mather, Increase, 59 
Matthews, Brander, viii, 12, 22, 202, 
243, 257, 263, 369, 377 
Maugham, W. Somerset, 284n 
Mead, Leon, 202n 
Mearns, Hugh, 220n, 326 
Meloney, W. B., 60n 
Menner, Robert J., 11, 74, 214n, 

218 

Meyer, Herman H. B., 172n 
Migliacci, Edoardo, 419 
Miller, Edith, 273n 
Molee, Elias, 29 
Montfort, Eugene, 29 
Monthly Mirror, 50 
Monthly Review, 50, 51n 
Montigny, Louvigny de, 411 
Moore, George, 14 
Morfill, W. R., 91 
Morris, Gouverneur, 60, 61 
Moslem Sunrise, 28 
Muirhead’s London, vii 
Murison, W., 39, 73 
Murray, Gilbert, 255 
Murray, James A. H., 243 
Myers, Gustavus, lOln 

Nares, Robert, 73n 
Nathan, George Jean, 170n 
National Council of Teachers of Eng¬ 
lish, viii, 12 

National Institute of Arts and Letters, 
330 

Neal, John, 83 

Nevinson, Henry W., 14, 19n 

Newbolt, Henry, 14 

New International Encyclopedia, 31, 
130n, 198n 

New Jersey Archives, 63 
Newton, Simon, 347n 
New York Sun, 70n 
New York Times, 25n 
New Y r ork World, 30 
Nieland, Dirk, 428 
Niles’ Register, 101 
Norris, Charles G., 254n 
North American Review, 62 
Norton, Charles Ledyard, 101 
Noyes, Alfred, 226n 

Oberndorf, C. P., 342n 
O’Brien, Seumas, 254n 
Ochs, Adolph S., viii, 12 
Oli pliant, S. Grant, 334n, 338 
O’Sullivan, Vincent, 25 

Palma, Ricardo, 6n 
Pattee, Fred Lewis, 32n 
Patterson, M. R., 378n 


Paulding, J. K., 83 
Perrett, Wilfrid, 218n, 250n 
Perry, Bliss, 68, 183n 
Philipson, David, 148n, 173n 
Phillips, Wendell, 179 
Phipson, Evacustes A., 223 
Pickering, John, 8, 40, 52, 61, 75, 81, 
97 

Pinkney, William, 63 
Poe, Edgar Allan, 36 
Polack, W. G., 132n, 224n 
Pomeroy, Samuel C., 88 
Pope, T. Michael, 165n 
Pory, John, 57 
Post, Emily, 144n 
Pound, Ezra, 315n 

Pound, Louise, 192, 201, 203n, 206n, 
209n, 221n, 259, 317n, 321, 350, 
363n, 372n 

Prince, J. Dyneley, 427 
Pulvermacher, N., 348n 
Purvey, John, 283 

Quarterly Review, 48n, 5In, 82, 86 
Quiller-Couch, Arthur, 35, 255 

Raleigh, Walter, 255 
Ramos y Duarte, Felix, 104 
Ramsay, David, 81 
Rauch, E. H., 408 
Read, Richard P., 232n 
Read, William A., 219n, 321, 

Real Academia Espanola de la Lengua, 
6 

Reed, Alfred Z., 88n 
Rittenhouse, Jessie B., 199n 
Robertson, D. M., 5n 
Robinson, Andrew, 60 
Roof, Katherine Metcalf, 17In 
Roosevelt, Theodore, 251 
Ross, Edgar M., 398 
Ruppenthal, J. C., 108n, 205n, 349n 
Rush, Benjamin, 2n 

Saintsbury, George, 255, 373 
Sala, George Augustus, 14 
Sandburg, Carl, 396 
Sargent, Porter E., 174n 
Saturday Evening Post, 187 
Sayce, A. H., 13, 39, 213, 214n, 225n, 
250n, 284, 395 

Scheie de Vere, Maxmilian, 6n, 42, 56, 
112 242 

Schoch, Alfred D., 28 
Schuchardt, H., 412n 
Searle, William G., 33ln 
Sechrist, Frank K., 370n 
Shaw, George Bernard, 157, 233n, 

245 


INDEX 


489 


Sheridan, Thomas, 73 
Sherman, W. T., 350, 434 
Shorter, Clement K., 174 
Simplified Spelling board, 251 
Skeat, W. W., 31n 
Smith, C. Alphonso, 301n, 381 
Smith, George J., 266 
Smith, John, 53 

Smith, Logan Pearsall, viii, 105n, 108, 
165, 184n, 255, 256n 
Smith, Sydney, 82 
Soci£t6 des Parlers de France, 5 
Society for Pure English, viii, 395 
Southey, Robert, 61, 83 
Spies, Heinrich, 26 
Springfield Republican, 25n, 153n 
Squire, J. C., 14, 18n 
Standard Dictionary, 66n, 252n 
Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 378 
Stef&nsson, Vilhjaimer, 430 
Steger, S. A., 237n 
Stephenson, John C., 146n 
Sterling, James, 83 
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 352 
Story, Joseph, 81 
Stribling, T. S., 176 
Sullivan, Raymond E., 102n 
Sumner, Charles, 91 
Sumner, William Graham, 80 
Sweet, Henry, 36n, 267n, 288n, 300n, 
303, 307, 309 
Synge, J. M. 396 

Tallichet, H., 188 
Talman, Charles F., 257 
Tammany Hall, 54, 101 
Taylor, Bayard, 87 
Taylor, E. B., 370n 
Thompson, Alexander M., 39In 
Thornton, Richard H., 6n, 15n, 43, 54n, 
57, 61, 62n, 64, 76, 88, 92, 96, 98n, 
99, 101, 104, 106n, 107, 112, 156, 
262, 35On 

Tooke, John Horne, 314 
Towne, Elizabeth, 434 
Town Topics, 107 
Traubel, Horace, 183 
Trine, Ralph Waldo, 434 
Trollope, Mrs., 152 
Trumbull, J. H., 160n 
Tucker, Gilbert M., 12n, 30, 44, 52, 
69n, 156, 216, 234 
Tupper, Martin F., 433 
Turner, Frederick J., 105n 


Undersokningen av Svenska Folkmal, 6 
United States Geographic Board, 365n 
Untermeyer, Louis, 90 

Van Andel, Henry J. G., 339n, 428 

Van Doren, Carl, 81n 

Van Riemsdyck, D. J., 429n 

Verga, Giovanni, 396n 

Vizetelly, Frank H., 109n, 114, 218 

Wachtel, C. H., 349n, 432 
Walker, John, 73n, 115, 237 
Walpole, Hugh, 14 
Walsh, Robert, 83 
Wardlaw, Patterson, 266n 
Ware, J. R., 95n, 99, 159, 164 
Warnock, Elsie L., 99, 197n, 203n 
Washington, George, 61 
Watson, H. B. Marriott, 167 
Watts, Harvey M., 393n 
Weaver, J. V. A., 277, 396, 405 
Webster, Daniel, 92 
Webster, Noah, 1, 7, 8, 61, 67, 72, 73, 
76, 87, 94, 113, 185, 225, 236, 250 
Webster, W. F., 267n 
Weekly, Ernest, 55 
Wells, H. G., 14, 163, 166, 192n 
Wendell, Barrett, 8In 
Wesley, John, 238 
Westminster Gazette, 19n 
Westminster Review, 30n 
Whewell, William, 38 
White, Richard Grant, 4n, 9, 12n, 38, 
61, 64, 114, 115, 145, 164, 185n, 227, 
250n 

Whitman, Walt, 89, 352, 357n, 395 

Wilcox, W. H., 265n 

Wilde, Oscar, 14 

Williams, R. O., 86, 138, 237n 

Williams, Whiting, 175 

Wilson, A. J., 126n 

Wilson, Edmund, Jr., 170, 379 

Wilson, W. A., 154 

Wilson, Woodrow, 16, 36, 195 

Winthrop, John, 235 

Witherspoon, John, 49, 97 

Wittmann, Elizabeth, 189n, 191, 193 

Worcester, Joseph E., 113, 115, 241 

Wright, Almroth, 163 

Wycliffe, John, 299 

Wyld, Henry Cecil, 216 

Yeats, W. B., 185 

Zetterstrand, E. A., 424 


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